My last blog post, about my happy experiences with the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) New Writers’ Scheme (NWS), was read by several of the committee of the RNA itself and they were so interested in the post and my thoughts on the scheme that I was granted the unlikely honour of writing a post for the RNA’s own blog.
The blog is updated twice weekly on a Tuesday and Friday and covers a wide range of topics of interest to the RNA with contributions from many well-known and highly respected writers.
My post, titled ‘Romance — “A Bloke’s Point of View”‘ covers similar points to the one I posted on this blog but the content is completely new — and starts with a little taster of how the characters in my novel might react if I walked into their local pub, The Angel, and announced I was a member of the RNA NWS.
Read it (and all the other fascinating posts) by following this link. If you’d like to add a comment or ask a question on there then that would be great.
As part of my membership of the NWS I get sent their newsletter, Romance Matters. The latest issue contains some very intriguing articles based on sessions at the RNA conference.
One considers how effective fiction works by triggering chemical responses in the brain that are identical to those in real, physical situations (e.g. desire, fear) — releasing oxytocin, adrenaline and so on. Another, quoting a session by author and academic Catherine Roach (who writes as Catherine LaRoche), discusses the psychological benefits to the reader of the romance narrative — suggesting that traditional romantic plot types work because of their empowering effect on readers, which, for the purposes of the argument, were assumed to be women. If female readers feel relatively disempowered and disenfranchised in society in comparison to men then the heroine redresses the balance, achieving happiness and fulfillment through risking her vulnerability and being true to herself. ‘The romance story is a woman-centred fantasy about how to make this man’s world work for her.’
It’s all really thought-provoking analysis, and as with my RNA NWS readers’ report, has provided me some with some intriguing insight when I’ve applied it to my own novel. I also found via Google that Catherine Roach has also published a feminist-orientated academic work called Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture(available as a free pdf download) which is very relevant to one plot strand of my novel — not wanting to let slip any spoilers I’ll say no more than that.
I revealed, rather coyly, in this blog post earlier in the year that I’d been accepted on the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme. When I mention this to people in conversation I occasionally receive the polite astonishment that I imagine a woman bricklayer might experience or a female pest-controller.
Seeing as a woman once climbed around my loft removing a wasps’ nest quickly and efficiently why should it be strange that a man might be a member of a Romantic Novelists’ Association scheme? Nevertheless, I’m subliminally tempted to add ‘No, I’m not planning to change gender or anything else. I’m still male’ – and during last week being able to point to the temporary beard I was forced to grow a beard after I fell over while out running — cutting my chin and breaking my thumb!
Entering a world popularly associated with the opposite gender is an illuminating experience — and valuable for a writer. Not that I’ve encountered any sexism at all through my membership of the scheme. The Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) appears extremely keen to be inclusive towards men, as I’m sure it towards everyone, and there are men who are full members of the RNA. I found a couple by Googling, although one writes under a female pseudonym and another specialises in male-male fiction and I’m doing neither of those. (I must point out that I can’t be a full member of the RNA myself until I have a suitable book published.)
Nevertheless, there are cultural perceptions about how men’s ability or desire to write romantic fiction. I’ve been reminded a few times of the discussion earlier this year on the Today programme between Jojo Moyes and Cathy Kelly on whether ‘men can make good romantic fiction writers’.
That’s an interesting question to think about while I’m writing today – the publication date of David Nicholls’s new novel Us –which brings up all sorts of issues about gender stereotyping of marketing and covers and reviews and so on, which could occupy a whole different blog post, maybe after I’ve read it. (I was surprised to read so many positive reviews of the novel in the weekend broadsheets after all the sniffiness about its Booker longlisting.)
However, any ribbing in the pub will be, ahem, small beer compared to the brilliant benefits of my membership of the RNA New Writers’ Scheme (NWS), which have surpassed all my expectations.
For those who haven’t yet discovered it, the RNA NWS allows all its members to take part in RNA activities but offers the invaluable service of using the expertise of one of a panel of 50 established authors to review each member’s full length novel manuscript.
Unsurprisingly the scheme is very heavily oversubscribed and reaches capacity within minutes when applications open each January. I tried and failed to join a couple of years ago but this year had better luck. The deadline for submitting a manuscript is the end of August, although well-organised writers submit theirs well in advance to avoid the last minute rush.
Of course I wasn’t one of them. Mine was sent in around 29th August. Given the manuscript’s substantial size I wasn’t expecting to get a response for several weeks. So I was stunned by its amazingly quick turnaround – within about three weeks. And I was taken aback by the wonderfully detailed and insightful report that I received from my reader (as the scheme is run anonymously all I know about her is that she is, indeed, a she).
While the scheme is intended for ‘romantic fiction’ this definition can include novels that might also be thought to belong in other genres provided it meets the criteria that ‘romantic content and love interest are integral to the story’. I’d like to think of my novel as ‘accessible literary fiction’, perhaps the sort of book in the intersection between mass-market and ‘literariness’ that reading groups often choose (my wild optimism is creeping in here).
While the novel’s narrative is anchored against the relationships between the two chief protagonists, it’s also full of content that I wouldn’t have expected to crop up in traditional romantic fiction — as a glance at some posts on this blog might suggest (spray painting street art, tapping and spiling barrels in pub cellars, TV cookery shows, German modernist artists, dodgy photos, ancient monuments and so on).
Therefore, when I received the manuscript back I was a little worried that perhaps the reason for its remarkably quick turnaround would be that only the first few chapters had been read and ‘Wrong Genre’ would be written on the title page in huge red letters.
It wasn’t — which was a huge relief and maybe showed up some preconceptions on my part about romantic fiction — preconceptions that were completely blown away when I started to scan the comprehensive reader’s report which started with the reader saying she enjoyed reading it. Phew!
The reader’s skill and experience clearly identified the conflict that propels the narrative — where two people meet, begin to realise how desperately they need each other but have to overcome huge obstacles in their way — and obstacles that they may not surmount. And if deciding who’s the person you want to spend the rest of your life with — and then trying to make it happen — isn’t a question worthy of a romantic novel then I’m not sure what is.
I needn’t have worried about the content either – my reader wasn’t at all shocked or surprised or puzzled by what was in the novel. All her comments were constructive – and, in the spirit of the best feedback, considered the writing on the terms of what it was trying to achieve rather than through any subjective personal preferences. That said, all feedback was made with the experienced critical eye of an author who was focused on how to get a manuscript into commercially publishable shape.
I can only go on my experience of what I received back from my reader but it consisted of a lengthy report on the whole novel – andshe’d gone through the manuscript and noted typos and formatting issues in pencil. This was the result of the investment of a considerable amount of time – so I’m glad she said she enjoyed reading the novel.
I mentioned in a covering letter that the novel had been workshopped through the MA and City University courses and workshopped with coursemates and tutors – and my reader was generous enough to say that ‘it showed’ (I’m interpreting that as a compliment!) I’m sure the RNA NWS readers wouldn’t hold back out of politeness if a manuscript was technically flawed or was full of poorly-written prose. However, one of the most valuable aspects of the report for me was that it casts a fresh eye over the whole novel from the perspective of a new reader — and, as the report carefully pointed out — the type of reader who’d most likely be the commercial target audience for the novel.
This brings an entirely different viewpoint to feedback received on a creative writing course from a tutor or fellow students – people who’ve provided expert, generous and vital feedback but who’ve also become familiar with the book’s evolution over an extended period — and have read it in three- or five-thousand word extracts over a long period.
Both approaches are, of course, extremely useful and complementary but the RNA NWS reader was in a position to focus on points that I’d begun to lose sight of through familiarity and through the way the novel has changed over time. She was able to remind me about bringing to the fore the aspects of a character or plot that a reader might instinctively root for (or be less engaged by) — and where to place the events that motor plot forward (and where to relax the pace).
Principles of narrative technique and structure aretaught on creative writing courses but, given the limited size of extracts that can be workshopped in a course environment, they’re necessarily difficult to assess over a novel-length work — and unless your course lasts forever they’re impossible to work on as exercises.
While the reader commented from a perspective of commercial marketability, she certainly didn’t do so from a ‘dumbed-down’ perspective. Obviously a well-read book-lover outside as well she referred me to a book translated from Dutch which proves that as well as being an authority on romance that she’s also well-read outside the genre.
The report was crammed with so much useful comment that I was prompted to write my own response to it where I took all the points and listed most of them out in ‘to-do’ list fashion – and I’ve been ticking them off.
There are also points that I’m going to need to reflect on carefully. The report picks up some elements in the novel that are deliberately subversive and individual and, while I want the writing to work as well as possible, I want to ensure I preserve everything that might make the novel quirky and original (a word used approvingly by the reader about the heroine).
Nevertheless, the recommendations for change are about aspects of the novel that can are easily fixable — essentially honing and tweaking the writing incrementally — rather than having to address major flaws. The report was sprinkled with some very complementary words — reading these made my week. I won’t repeat them here but they provided encouragement to get on and put the revisions into the manuscript. Having received this extremely useful feedback from the RNA NWS, I’m relieved that I’m still yet to properly start the submission process to agents in earnest. Once I’ve worked through the feedback through the novel can’t fail to be stronger.
I’d imagine the RNA NWS offers something different to the various manuscript assessment services available because it’s an initiative that aims to help writers become eligible for its professional membership (and I’d love to go along to the RNA events, although I admit I’d be a little hesitant before walking through the door.) Based on my own experience (an admittedly small sample of one) I’d wholeheartedly recommend the RNA NWS to anyone whose novel fulfils the acceptance criteria (see above and the RNA website).
I’d like to thank the organiser, Melanie Hilton, for finding me such a suitable, knowledgeable and diligent reader who, though anonymous, knows via Melanie that I’ve passed on my deep gratitude.
Warning: contains a few set-list spoilers and lengthy, unrestrained, gushing sentimentality and a few misty-eyed personal reminiscences.
We knew we were on Row E — so good seats — five rows back, obviously. So we counted backwards as we walked through the stalls K…J…H…I…H…G…F…E
Er, what’s happened to A, B, C and D? This must be wrong. This can’t be happening to us. And then the people in the adjacent seats said they’d thought the same too.
There must be another row E in the stalls somewhere — one that isn’t really right in front of the stage — one that isn’t only feet from where Kate Bush would be standing in half-an-hour’s time for her second performance in 35 years.
What my friend Andrew didn’t know (and I guess no-one else did either) was that when he’d hit the enter on the day of the Kate Bush fan pre-sale was that the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo’s seat rows A-D were to be removed to accommodate the unusually demanding theatrical requirements of the exactingly perfectionist performer.
In a State of Shock — With My Sister
The need for the larger stage was revealed during the show with numerous trap-doors and pieces of stage machinery concealed beneath. At one point Kate Bush herself must have crawled under the stage virtually opposite my feet (I won’t give the explanation — it would be a big spoiler). I was also close enough to fear at one point that I’d be whacked in the head by a strange, rotating musical instrument.
I was in seat 14 — about four seats to the left of dead centre — which puts me in very select company. However, from the reaction of everyone else to discovering the true location of Row E, it seems they also applied for the tickets as normal fans. So no music festival style VIP-only cordon by the stage for Kate Bush. However, I’m sure all of us lucky enough to get hold of any tickets at all through the booking process (even the fan-sale) felt very privileged indeed.
email of the year
Apologies if my (or, more accurately, my friend’s) extraordinary good fortune is provoking any raging jealousy (it certainly would with me) but it goes to show that Kate Bush see,s to have prioritised her fans — while expensive the tickets weren’t the sort of Russian oligarch prices that she could have charged — and the reselling sites are actually trying to charge. (Buyer beware — ID is checked against tickets on entry.)
Also the production itself must have been orders of magnitude more expensive to stage than a conventional rock concert. The only equivalents in musical theatrically I can think of are Pink Floyd’s The Wall or the Beatles-based LOVE in Las Vegas. The latter was brilliant but, of course, the singers and the band weren’t playing live.)
I have virtually every piece of music she’s ever released — and I’ve been listening to it on shuffle for the past two weeks. And not just the albums but vinyl single B-sides and bizarre CD single curiosities like Ken — with lyrics asking if the former GLC leader is a ‘funky sex machine’ (really).
I was wondering if she’d keep the local London political theme going with the comeback but, sadly, Boris was missing from the set-list (if you’re reading this Kate, there’s still time to dash it off).
And, as my post on the perceptive analysis in Under the Ivy points out, Kate Bush’s music has been a big influence on my writing (he adds, remembering that this is — loosely — a blog about writing). It’s also been the soundtrack to certain very significant episodes in my life.
I’m sure the number of female characters in my novel or and my attempts at writing from a female point of view have been heavily influenced by the extraordinarily insights that Kate Bush’s music and lyrics provide into female perspective, notably in songs like Hounds of Love, Running Up That Hill. Similarly, I also might not have had the nerve to go into certain territory in the novel that deals with the closeness ‘between a man and a woman’ without following Kate Bush’s courageous example in those amazingly intimate songs on the second side of The Kick Inside.
This isn’t just a male perception, I know her themes resonate deeply with many women. My sister was sitting next to me during the show and she was incredibly moved to be there in the presence of a woman who’d been a huge influence on her life.
There are several slightly buried Kate Bush references in my novel – one from The Dreaming was picked up straight away by fellow Kate Bush fanatic, Anne, from the MMU course. (Anne’s going to be fortunate enough to see the show in a couple of weeks). And there may be other subconscious influences: I now wonder if an inspiration for having a painter in the novel is down to side two of Aerial. If so, thanks Kate for opening the windows to me about the world of art.
Omar Hakim’s Drumming Was Breathtaking in Running Up That Hill and King of the Mountain
To reinfoce the point that Kate Bush’s music has long been part of my life, as well as my sister, I went to the concert with two ex-school friends.
I remember sitting in my bedroom with my friend David on holiday from university discussing The Hounds of Love, especially The Big Sky 12″ Meteorological Mix — ‘That cloud looks like industrial waste!’ being one of her lesser known lyrics. I remember moaning, pre-Hounds of Love about the interminable wait for her next album — it turned out to be three years — perhaps the 35 years I had to wait to see her live has served me right for my ungratefulness?
Kate Bush’s most profound effect on me — and something that’s likely to be very deeply ingrained — was when I studied for a year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Just before I flew out to the US Running Up That Hill, which I loved, had very recently been released. But the album Hounds of Love hadn’t. At that time Kate had only achieved cult recognition in America — a sort of indie, student act. While Hounds of Love was becoming a huge seller in the UK, it hadn’t even been released in the US, where I couldn’t get hold of it. This was, of course, before the days of the internet, iTunes and even the post could take two weeks to arrive. I was desperate to listen to the album that I’d waited (I thought then) for so long to be released.
I was pretty homesick, at times, with the culture shock when I first arrived in California and the American lack of appreciation of Kate Bush’s genius probably made me even more miserable. But a few weeks after the UK release and after I’d kept visiting the record shops in Isla Vista to keep asking when it would arrive (I think they’ve all shut now), the album was quietly released in the US. I got hold of a cassette version — and played it incessantly.
Kate Bush was so brilliantly, beautifully eccentrically English. Whenever I missed home, I’d play Hounds of Love and,Running Up That Hill in particular — and it would make everything about England seem so much more reassuringly close. Eventually the album broke through in the US in a modest way and Kate Bush’s videos were played on MTV (although they used the Wogan show appearance of Running Up That Hill rather than the apparently over-erotic dance video).
With many other British bands becoming popular in America at that time, in our apartment MTV was a frequent reminder of home — with videos like Dream Academy’s Life in a Northern Town (‘the north’),Whitney Houston’s Saving All My Love for You (London) and Shout by Tears for Fears (Durdle Door in Dorset) almost like mini-travelogues.
There are many other Kate Bush related memories, like sitting with a girlfriend at university at the end of Nic Roeg’s film Castaway (I think I must have read in the reviews about its copious nudity) when a very familiar voice began singing an unknown song — Be Kind to My Mistakes — still very obscure. ‘Sit down. We can’t move. It’s Kate Bush’. I’m not sure she was thrilled as me about staying all the way through the closing credits. Or the first time I heard King of the Mountain — the first new song to be released in 13 years. I was driving but I welled up — ‘Sounds a bit odd. Mumbled. Hold on. I like those drums. It’s good. It’s bloody good. She’s back. She’s back and she’s still good.’
And on Wednesday she was standing right in front of me. No one else was in the space between me and the person who’d created the music — and images — that had affected and influenced me so profoundly. At fleeting points in the performance I must have been the closest person to her. (My coat, which I’d left against the bottom of the stage, was suddenly covered by one of the props during one section and I was worried it would get dragged on stage by accident).
One of the Most Sought After Pieces of Tissue Paper in London — The Ninth Wave
For the whole audience, being in the presence of Kate Bush was an overwhelming experience in itself – throughout the show you didn’t have to look far to spot people in floods of tears. We were close enough to see every expression on her face – and rather suffering stage fright, as had been the fear, she appeared humbled and genuinely surprised by the spontaneous standing ovation when she first walked on stage.
One of the strange aspects of the recent media coverage of the concerts is that virtually all the images used of Kate Bush have been those taken in her twenties. This might be unsurprising because there have been extraordinarily few photographs of her in the past 20 years – a few very artfully created portraits for the CDs and less than a handful of ‘real life’ photos – the most recent being when she received her CBE from the Queen last year.
It’s been rumoured that she’s now very self-conscious about her appearance but she didn’t give any indication that she was. Nor ought she to be – she looked wonderful. Of course, she wasn’t going to be in rolling on a mat in a leotard. At 56, she appears to have aged gracefully and while she wore bulky outfits, she certainly doesn’t look, close up, as if she has any weight problem at all (some newspaper columnists and reviewers ought not to base their comments on concert photos or observing from a distance).
She did the show barefoot and her feet were occasionally within theoretical touching distance. When David’s wife Sue (who was in the circle) asked if Kate’s toenails were painted I was able to say without hesitation that they were’t. After all, I’d been looking at them for nearly three hours. I was so close to her physically that I could even see the thin plaits she had woven into her famously thick hair and trickles of sweat glistening on her temples.
Remarking on her physical closeness isn’t meant to be weirdly obsessive and stalker-like – all the people I know who’ve seen the concerts and everyone who’s tweeted has said similar. But this was someone who been in a huge, life-sized poster on my bedroom wall throughout my final year at university. She was stepping out of the page and into the sensual world. What was the biggest privilege of being so close to the performance is that I’ll no longer think of Kate Bush in terms of the images of quarter of a century ago – as a two dimensional icon – but as a person who’s as real and tangible as someone I might bump into in the pub or on the tube.
I’ve read some comments on Twitter comparing the show to a religious experience. I can see why — the emotion was so overwhelming it was physical for me and, I’m sure, for most of the rest of the audience. However, in my case, it was the opposite of religious — the icon we’d all only known from music and images was manifested as a ‘normal’ person — albeit one recognisable from all the images and able to sing with that beautiful voice. She might be a creative genius but she’s actually just like the rest of us — a point so obvious it’s banal to make about most artists. But this was supposedly the music industry’s eccentric recluse, someone whom I don’t think has given a TV interview in over 20 years.
I’d kept lowering my expectations before the show – and the moments between the band arriving on stage and Kate Bush herself were heart-pounding, as much with dread as anticipation. Surely she’d only be able to use the lower registers of her voice and the songs would sound OK but not a patch the records?
Lily, the opening number, seemed to have been chosen to as a vocal warm-up her voice – short, low phrases with the backing singers in full-throated support. But she sounded amazingly good. Then it was straight into Hounds of Love – much earlier than I’d expected but also a low-pitched vocal. Suddenly, the fourth song, Top of the City, its slow passages sung with heart-melting softness (‘he’s no good for you, baby, he’s no good for you now’) alternating with soaring, climactic high-notes. Her voice was sounded, incredibly, as good as the original recordings.
In her own lengthy programme notes, which are remarkably personal and detailed (longer, even, than this blog post), it’s revealed that there’s a sound engineer solely dedicated to her vocal sound. But I was close enough at times to hear her voice unamplified and it was genuine – no auto-tune for Kate Bush.
An Amazing Array of Instruments
Vocally, Kate Bush is one of a kind and the second public live performance of songs I knew so well was an experience I never expected to occur at all, let alone witness myself. What was even more extraordinary was that Kate appeared very conscious of the audience’s response. She’s by no means an in-your-face stage performer and her facial expressions and small gestures to the band won’t have been obvious from the back of the theatre. She grinned in a deadpan way at the start of the show, almost appearing awestruck by the audience’s ecstatic reception (as if gesturing ‘Are these people really going beserk for me? They are? This is unbelievable. Well, here I go.’)
She was subtly looked at people in the audience, even making eye contact after which she’d smile, rock her head from side to side, move her feet a bit more emphatically and then deliver another astonishingly perfect vocal. It was if she was asking ‘Are you enjoying this? Am I doing OK? That’s good. Now I’m really going to go for it.’ Perhaps lots of famous performers do this if you get close enough. But, as she expressed with her the request for no cameras, this low-key but emphatic connection with the audience was an amazingly intimate experience. (Later, in the conceptual parts of the show, she concentrated on acting in character.)
I’d expect most of the looks she got in return would along the lines of ‘Yes, you’re doing brilliantly, Kate, and by the way you’re a bloody genius’. I was trying to convey as much. But her modesty and initial tentativeness provided an insight into the creative process – the greatest artists are also generally the most self-critical and depend and thrive and on the reassurance of their audience. This is particularly performers but no doubt also includes many writers too. It was a profoundly humbling experience — feeling as if Kate Bush was looking at me, checking that I enjoying the show she’d put so much effort into staging. I’m sure she felt the same about the other 3,000 people there but these were moments of absolute individual pleasure.
Somewhere Handy to Put My Magazine While I Put My Coat On
I won’t go dwell on detail about the theatrics of the show – there are many glowing news reports and reviews on the web. And the spectacle is so impressive that’s it’s better to let the narrative play out itself.
With tickets for the second night I’d managed to avoid knowing too much detail about the show until I’d seen it for myself. I’d largely avoideded knowledge of the set-list (so I was one of those who gasped when the opening chords to Running Up That Hill appeared so early in the show). I bought the excellent programme but I’d avoided reading it before the show. So I had no idea that the very young, gangly backing singer who appeared to take an increasingly more prominent part in the show was someone with particular significance.
In the rocking-living-room-HP-sauce-and-toad-in-the-hole interlude (it’s too bizarre to concisely describe and the dialogue probably won’t win a Booker Prize for David Mitchell), my sister asked ‘Do you think that’s her son?’
‘No,’ I thought. ‘It can’t be.’ After all, his existence was secret until she sang exultantly about him in Bertie on Ariel — when he was about eight years old. But then he did seem to be the right sort of age and he did look very similar to those photos of Kate Bush’s brothers from the start of her career – and the way she stood behind him looking enormously proud as he lolled on a sofa mulling out loud whether to watch QI or Liverpool v Chelsea on the television? It was indeed ‘that son of mine’.
With that discovery, everything suddenly made sense. The woman who wrote songs like Breathing, the Kick Inside, Room for the Life, Cloudbusting, Mother Stands for Comfort, A Coral Room and This Woman’s Work– all about birth and parenthood – wanted the audience to share her enormous pride in her own son. That this intensely private artist wanted to introduce her audience to her family was an incredible gesture of bonding. This is why I’ve been quiet for the last sixteen years – he’s been the priority in my life – and isn’t he wonderful? She was inviting us to celebrate her music and her family – this woman’s work indeed.
Without Bertie, we now know from the programme, ‘this would never have happened’ and he was the force who ensured his mother overcame her fear to ‘commit to pushing the “go” button’. The timing of the shows must also have been determined by Bertie’s involvement – albeit in a very non-rock’n’roll way.
As his mother writes in the programme: ‘In order for him to be part of this, which was always part of the deal, he has had to work really hard in order to keep up his school commitments as well as his commitments to the show.’ So it’s fair to assume that the rehearsals will have been timed to start after Bertie finished his GCSEs in the summer. Presumably he’ll go back to studying for his A-levels after the last show on 1st October.
One of Kate Bush’s most haunting opening lines is in Blow Away (for Bill) on Never For Ever — take a look at the cover of that album and it will clear up any doubts about her recurrent themes of female sexuality and motherhood: ‘One of the band told me last night/That music is all that he’s got in his life.’
These shows, and their incredible gestation time, are perhaps a sign that she took that lyric as a warning. Music isn’t all Kate Bush had had in her life. Given Bertie’s role, these live shows haven’t been half a lifetime in coming – they’ve been staged at the earliest possible opportunity.
As Graeme Thomson says in Under the Ivy what’s particularly remarkable about Kate is ‘the extraordinarily positive ways in which Bush views men’ — and she brought on stage the man she’d brought into the world herself (or, at Bertie’s age, more the Man with the Child in Eyes). This was another profound statement about creativity — and one that seems to tie in with the otherwise rather baffling wooden puppet-mannequin that roamed the stage in the second half.
Priceless
Bertie’s involvement isn’t cheesy or sentimental either. If anything he was a more confident performer than his admiring mother. Being so close to a sixteen year old acting out the role of the painter in A Sky of Honey, in which he sang his own song, Tawny Moon, (I don’t whether Bertie or his mum wrote it — but she wrote some classic songs at thirteen), made me forget I was at such a momentous event. Willing Bertie to pull off such a professional performance was, bizarrely, like being, in the nicest possible way, one the audience at a school play – albeit the most incredibly imaginative, spectacular one ever.
I found an interview from 2005 on the Guardian’s website in which Kate Bush describes how Bertie reacted to the news that his mother was going to meet the Queen: ‘The thing is I would do anything for Bertie and making an arsehole of myself in front of a whole roomful of people and the Queen, I mean …’
In front of Wednesday’s roomful of people she certainly didn’t do that.
Incidentally, the request not to use cameras applied to the actual performance (see below). The security people were perfectly happy for people to take pictures before and after the show. Even so, I’ve cropped some of the images to avoid revealing anything more than the musical instruments on stage you’d expect from a conventional show. While I could have taken a photo of Kate that was much closer up than anything that’s been published I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing so – let alone posting it online.
As of today I can safely say, nearly four years after I embarked on the course, that I’m a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing!
It’s time to celebrate — in a suitably virtual way.
Having received a letter a week or two ago informing me that the Manchester Metropolitan University’s examinations committee had approved the award of my postgraduate degree, I was invited to the English Department degree congregation ceremony in Bridgewater Hall, due to be held tonight. I’d really liked to have attended — to mark the end result of all that hard work over a keyboard — but for various reasons, mainly geographical and connected with the day job — meant that I decided to stay in keeping with the philosophy of an online course and decided to have a virtual graduation instead.
So I got in touch with fellow graduates Anne and Kerry (who were also absentee ‘graduands’) and we decided to raise our glasses to each other this evening at the point where we’d have been on stage shaking hands with the vice-chancellor (or whoever).
Actually, Kerry had even more of a reason to celebrate in her absence as she was awarded the Michael Schmidt prize for best portfolio on the Creative Writing MA course which I see as a great vindication of taking the course via the online route. Well done Kerry from your fellow online students — I’ve heard murmurings that the novel (The Black Country) that won the portfolio prize may working its way through the publication labyrinth. I’ll post on the blog when the work that I saw emerge through the workshopping process might become commercially available.
A Suitably British Place to Watch the Tour de France
My novel is set partly in London (the City and über cool Shoreditch) where you only have to walk down the street or take a bus to realise there’s an abundance of non-native inhabitants.
And it doesn’t need a UKIP party political broadcast to point out that the recent changes in the population of London and the consequent changes in its character are particularly linked to rights of free movement within the European Union and its expansion eastwards.
One of my main characters, Kim, is a proud German but also an equally proud Londoner and thorough Anglophile — and she’s happy to live in cosmopolitan London indefinitely. It’s the hub of her world as an artist — but the price of living at the centre is the huge expense.
Kim goes to live in the countryside and her adjustment to life outside London — in a symbolic ‘green and pleasant land’ — unfolds as a significant element of the novel’s narrative. Unlike London, with its diverse neighbourhoods and coexisting communities, Kim has to gradually assimilate into a more closed, conservative and less fragmented community, which nonetheless already hosts a large number of immigrants.
The storyline may resonate with the inevitable debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe which will rumble on for the next few years — as whatever the outcome of the election Europe is bound to be a very hot topic.
Given that I’m rather sceptical about the supposed mood of Euroscepticism in the country, I was intrigued by the reception given to Le Grand Départ — the start of that most continental of events. Over the last weekend the Tour de France staged what was effectively a takeover of large parts of Yorkshire and it rode into London on Monday.
How would the supposedly Eurosceptic British react to an invasion of foreigners spearheaded by the oldest enemy of them all? We loved it.
The French Advance on Buckingham Palace
The road that connects Buckingham Palace with the Houses of Parliament — the axis of British government — was invadedon Monday by all things French — French TV cameras, banners in French, adverts for French supermarkets that we don’t even have in this country, the gendarmerie riding around London and even commentary in French relayed around the Mall and St. James’s Park. Surely this kind of thing would give Nigel Farage palpitations?
And the French invasion went right through London and beyond with the road to Tower Bridge sealed off because the French invasion procession was coming right past the Tower of London — look out for the crown jewels — and, as my photo shows, it caused huge disruption to the daily operation of the City of London.
Spot the Beefeater
Were those entire Cities financial types w ho deserted their offices en masse at 3.15pm on a busy Monday heading to the barricades to remonstrate with meddlesome Europeans whose garlic-fuelled bike ride was interfering with the pinnacle of human endeavour — swapping money from one account to the next at the speed of light?
Perhaps Nigel preferred the Tour de France to the tur din România (and if you thought I Google translated that you’d be dead right) and the little Englanders might be relieved the whole moving carnival would soon be back in the land of hundreds of fromages (hang on, isn’t that us too these days?) .
But actually the hordes of City evacuees — and the many spectators from office windows — weren’t objecting to the French incursion — they were celebrating. Because, as the Olympics also showed two years ago, there’s nothing more the British like than to welcome the rest of the world and lay on a rather good party.
Not Exactly Trooping the Colour on Birdcage Walk
London often provides the backdrop to the historic and exotic but this Tour de France was inspired because it also visited one of the most diehard conservative realms of the national consciousness — Yorkshire. ‘There’s nowt about thy fancy foreign ways that impresses me.’ And I can say that without much fear of being accused of regional stereotyping because I was brought up about three miles from the route of Stage 2.
On Sunday the cyclists pedalled through the landscape of my formative years — the foothills of the Pennines. I used to frequently walk on the bleak moors that mark the Lancashire-Yorkshire border (the landscape that inspired the Brontës, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath amongst others) and the aerial views of the hills, valleys and reservoirs between Haworth, Hebden Bridge and Ripponden looked forbiddingly beautiful on television.
I would have loved to have travelled up north for the race. The atmosphere amongst the 10,000 people who lined the route in the mile or so of the race where the route crossed on to the Lancashire side looked incredible – and what might not have been obvious from the television pictures was that, as the main roads were closed all day, the vast majority of the spectators in this section had to walk or cycle three miles, involving a near thousand feet vertical climb from the valley below.
I came across some amazing photographs on Facebook of Carrefour floats and French motorcycling gendarmes passing flag-waving crowds on roads in places so inhospitable that there are no houses for several miles (and these photos had bikes on them unlike mine — which failed to capture any cyclists due to various camera disasters). The crowds gathered only a couple of miles away from some of the most notoriously desolate peat bogs on the Pennine Way.
The landlady of the White House Inn, on Blackstone Edge — one of only two dwellings along a five mile stretch of the A58, remarked that the visit of the Tour de France ‘made me proud to be British‘.
This isn’t as bizarrely contradictory as it sounds – welcoming visitors is something the British take pride in – and is at odds with the rhetoric of the isolationists and Eurosceptics.
My fictional idyllic village has made many foreign residents feel very welcome — American art lecturers, Polish cooks, Indian techies and so on — and they play a full part in English country life.
While the Tour de France was a novelty and a spectacle it still showed a desire to engage with Europe – and even better if it was also an exercise in the indulgence of another typical British trait — celebrating an excuse to get drunk.
The caravan that travelled through Yorkshire and into the heart of London was a peculiar celebration of French and Yorkshire promotions — big Visit Yorkshire floats, motorised Fruit Shoots and a speeding Carrefour mountain.
The whole spectacle showed how the British embraced a temporarily transplanted icon of Europe in a way that Jeremy Deller might describe as celebrating ‘Joy in People’ — even if they were mostly French and on bikes.
Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and the Shard Wait for the Tour de France
Do you think the Tour de France confounded the Eurosceptic stereotypes — I’d love to read any comments below.
I remember when J.K. Rowling’s cover was blown as also being crime author Robert Galbraith when one critic who’d actually reviewed the book at the time it was published, in apparent ignorance of the author’s true identity, remarked that the ‘male’ author/narrator had an unusually attentive eye for women’s fashion.
Without the chase of the literary whodunit over Robert Galbraith’s real identity, it’s doubtful whether the passing observation about the author’s apparently unusual male eye would have been of any great significance — it may have been a clue that an author might have been writing under another gender. But it could also plausibly be explained if a male author had been particularly diligent in his research on female fashions — or may even have had a keen interest in the subject.
In general I’m quite sceptical about gender biases in writing being innate. The pigeon-holing of male and female writers (and readers) into particular genres is probably a result of marketing that plays to rather cliched and old-fashioned societal expectations. Nevertheless I do sometimes develop a hunch about anonymous writers’ genders from pieces of journalism or non-fiction but this impression forming way be deliberate in terms of the markets the writing is targeting.
Also remember that J.K. Rowling was published under her initials rather than Christian name of Joanne because it was thought that Harry Potter’s original target audience of older boys would be put off by a woman author’s name. But that doesn’t change the fact that the books were written by a woman, whether disguised or not, and it makes the point that plenty of female writers enjoy stereotypically male subjects like horror, fantasy and the more gory end of the crime spectrum. Certainly some of my fellow female MA students embraced these genres and at York Festival of Writing last year I met Sharon Bolton in a workshop whose novels have titles like Blood Harvest and a reviewer describes as filling every sentence with menace.
That said, It’s probably less common for books by ‘male’ authors to enter traditionally ‘female’ territory — stories overtly about relationships, family and romance. The inverted commas highlight that the name on the book may give a misleading or incomplete impression of the writer — there are various stories about how some very successful commercial genre romance writers are men with female nom-de-plumes and there are examples of books written from a female point-of-view, like S.J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep where the gender of the writer is not made explicit.
Of course explicitly male writers do deal with emotional subjects, which are fundamental to the human condition, such as relationships, families and, to cite a notorious female stereotype, shopping. However, it’s often done under the cover of a concept or genre that overlays the underlying emotional themes — such as humour, crime, sport, even war. the Plenty of female writers also write about human relationships in a less-direct way but it seems to be true to say that there’s no direct male equivalent of chick-lit — so noticeably that it was the subject of a Radio Four Today programme item earlier this year.
As mentioned in a previous post, I joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers Scheme so I’m possibly in that small number — I’ll find out if my work is romantic enough when I send my manuscript off to be read by their romance expert readers!
These questions made me wonder if debate if I had biases built into my own approach to writing. Would I be as lucid as Robert Galbraith in describing the fashions worn by my female characters? I’m fairly sure the answer would be ‘no’.
That’s not to say I can’t imagine what my female characters would look like or that I’m unobservant in real-life about women’s appearance — it’s mainly that, as a male who’s mainly only ever bought men’s clothes, I haven’t acquired the relevant vocabulary. The fact that I haven’t said I exclusively buy male clothes is because I’ve bought presents and the like on occasion — not that I have a penchant for buying the odd bit of frilly lingerie (sorry to disappoint anyone who might be looking for pictures but if other people want to do that, then, of course, that’s all fine by me.)
And there are other areas where I’ve sometimes laboured in coming up with a description for the same reason — I haven’t been exposed to the right vocabulary. Fragrance is one example. About eighteen months ago I went to an excellent Love Art London event at Angela Flanders perfumery in Artillery Row in the City where fragrance expert Odette Toilette (she’s real, honestly!) matched fragrances to some well known pre-Raphaelite paintings.
It was an excellent event — and I was well in the minority in gender terms — but made me realise how hard it was (for me anyway) to try to describe aromas and fragrances in words. But smell is such a crucial sense that it would seem more than worthwhile to make the effort to try and learn how to describe it in an evocative way and I made a modest step in that direction by buying a book on how fragrances are created.
Are there any similar gaps in your experience that you feel might show through in your writing and, if so, I’d be fascinated to hear how you overcame them.
As mentioned in my Blog Hop post from last week, the relay has continued this Monday with three writers from my MA Creative Writing course taking up the baton. All are great posts about three fascinating novels.
I’ve seen drafts of Kerry Hadley’s novel The Black Country while workshopping on the Manchester Metropolitan University course. She describes it very well in her post — a story that skilfully reveals a very dark core from an ostensibly everyday suburban situation. And the narrator plays an intriguing role that’s still a mystery to me, having not had the chance to read the complete novel. Kerry’s blog is at: http://kerryhadley.weebly.com/kerrys-blog/another-blog-hop
Anne is working on a new piece of writing, House of Scars, which is in the science fiction and/or fantasy genres, as was her work on the MA course. In her previous work, Anne showed her talent at creating a credible , dystopian world — inhabited by characters the reader can immediately relate to. To do this in an alternative reality seems a lot harder task to me than placing a novel in the contemporary world where the reader can bring their own points of reference to the writing. Anne originally comes from Denmark but the quality of her writing is so fluent you’d never suspect she comes from the trendy land of Scandi-noir and this year’s Eurovision. Anne’s blog is at: http://annekirstinejensen.wordpress.com/
Matt Cresswell, who’s based in Manchester. In addition to his writing he runs Glitterwolf magazine which is described on its website as ‘a UK-based literary and arts magazine that publishes the best poetry, fiction, art and photography by contributors identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.’ Matt is also working on a new project since workshopping with me on the MMU course. From the blog post it sounds like a highly imaginative story —Tintwistle & Co., which is set in ‘a sort of steampunked London’ and featuring ‘a short, sharp, opera-singing detective’. Matt’s blog can be found here: http://mcresswell.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/blog-hop-monday-the-return/
And next week the blog continues (and goes international too) with contributions from:
I’d like to say thank you very much to Lisa Goll for inviting me to take part in this ‘blog hop’. Lisa is organiser of the extremely successful London Writers Café Meetup Group — her entry on this Blog Hop was published last Monday.
I’ll answer the three vital Blog Hop questions below but, as an aside, I’d recommend anyone in the London area who’s interested in writing to go along to one of the London Writers’ Café events — I’ve been to some great agent and author talks and also to the convivial Christmas party at the BFI on the Southbank.
The answers below are about my ‘just-about-to-be-almost-finished’ novel The Angel but, for a short taster of my writing, I’d invite anyone who’s interested to read the previous post on this blog — that’s directly below this one. It tells how one of my short stories was read at an event last week by the amazing Liars League London. Or just check out the Liars’ League website directly (after reading my answers, of course) where the text of the story can be found, along with a video of a great performance by actor Sarah Feathers. There’s another story of mine in the March section too.
1. When and where is the story set?
My novel is set in the recent past in the aftermath of the credit crunch. In retrospect, I think this will be a fascinating time for people to reflect back on — a time where economic ‘certainties’ evaporated and many people’s lives were thrown into turmoil unimaginable a short time earlier.
Where is it set? In the pub!
The Angel is an idyllic village pub that gives the novel its title. Although plenty of boozy action happens in and around the pub but there’s actually much more to the novel’s setting. There are two principal locations: the early action mainly happens in Shoreditch and the City of London, then the story moves to the bucolic Chiltern village where The Angel stands next to the green. While it’s less than forty miles from Shoreditch, the many contrasts between the two locations echo the conflict between the main characters which brings me to…
2. What can you say about the main characters?
…James, Kim and Emma.
I could talk all day about my main characters (and the minor ones) — in fact sometimes I feel like I’ve been talking all day to the characters. I’ve become so involved with them while developing the novel that they seem like old friends. I occasionally see people in public and think ‘Yes, the way her hair is cut is just like Kim or she stands exactly like Emma would’.
With an Oxford degree, well-paid City job, beautiful wife and enviable house in the country, James ought to feel like life’s served him up a banquet. But, a fanatical home cook, he nurtures a frustrated ambition to set up his own restaurant and hopes his appearance on a TV cooking show contest will kick-start his gastro-career.
Kim is a German abstract artist with a studio in Shoreditch and an unscrupulous art-dealer boyfriend who’s manipulated her into a few dodgy commissions that she might come to regret. She abuses her body, is steeped in debt but determined to succeed as an artist — publicising her work by climbing East End buildings to painting street art.
Emma, James’s wife, is a senior human resources manager for one of Britain’s biggest supermarkets and is extremely ambitious and aspires to the lifestyle of a director of a FTSE-100 company, with all its luxurious trappings. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly — and this often includes James.
3. What is the main conflict?
At its heart, The Angel is a romance and the principal conflict occurs when James buys one of Kim’s paintings and becomes intrigued by her — she represents everything he feels he’s constrained from becoming himself. And although she’s far from conventionally beautiful — she’s studded with piercings and wears fetish gear — he finds himself unaccountably attracted to her. How prepared is he to risk his marriage to Emma to get close to this quirky artist?
There’s plenty of psychological conflict within each character too — James is struggling to assert his own ambitions against the expectations of others, Kim is fighting to keep faith in her destiny as an artist, despite continual setbacks. Emma is coming to the realisation that her husband may not share her dreams.
The novel also highlights the conflicts between a life in the City, über-hipster, post-industrial Shoreditch and the timeless villages of rural England — between the traditional British identity and the cool perspective of modern Europeans.
So there’s a whistlestop tour of the background to my novel and its main characters. There’s plenty more about The Angel and how it’s evolved if you dip into the blog.
So who’s next on the Blog Hop? The three people who’ve kindly accepted to take the baton from me in this blog tour are all ex-coursemates from my Manchester Metropolitan University MA in Creative Writing — and three marvellous and very different writers and their work kept me gripped throughout the course. They will be publishing their answers to the three big questions on their own blogs on 26th May (see below for details).
Matt Cresswell
Matt Cresswell is a writer and editor from Manchester. His fiction has appeared in Icarus, Southpaw, PIYE, Iris, Hearing Voices and Shenanigans (Obverse). He is the co-creator of End of the Rainbow webcomic, with the omnibus due out from Lethe Press any day now and the editor of Glitterwolf Magazine, a literary and arts magazine showcasing lgbt contributors.
Kerry Hadley is author of an anthology of short fiction called Fifty-One Ways to Leave your Lover,which available from Amazon. All proceeds from its sale go to the charity Platform 51, which helps girls and women in challenging circumstances. Kerry has an MA in Creative Writing and her novel will, hopefully, be published by spring next year.
Anne Jensen was born in Denmark – she moved to England in 1995. Having recently completed an MA in Creative Writing, she is now currently working on her second novel, House of Scars. She lives and writes in Salisbury.
As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been fortunate enough to have another of my short stories selected as a winner by the Liars’ League . Titled Elevator Pitch, it featured in theMay event, themed Beginnings and Ends.
Elevator Pitch was the final story to be performed on the night. This will have been due in no small part to the actor, Sarah Feathers’s, tremendously energetic and humorous performance, which I’m sure will have sent the audience homewards with a real buzz.
The video is now available on the Liars’ League website along with the manuscript of the story. I’ve embedded a link to Sarah’s reading below. It lasts just under fifteen minutes. (A podcast is also now available of the whole night’s readings.)
As in March, I went to the rehearsals the weekend before the show, met Sarah and sat in on the read-through. The story involves three characters in a confined space and Sarah did a brilliant job of bringing each character to life, using body language, gestures and facial expressions to complement the dialogue.
It’s an incredible privilege to watch a professional lift your words off the page and voice plausible characters that hold an audience’s attention. It feels like alchemy – and, as mentioned in the post after March’s Liars’ League, it’s an invaluable insight into how writing is interpreted by a reader.
It’s fascinating to discover details that an actor has added into the story on their own initiative before the rehearsal – in this story Sarah had some great views on how to deliver the male character’s voice.
Some of the Liars’ League stories tend to focus on narratorial exposition or one character’s internal voice and this can make them extremely compelling (Birth Planby Uschi Gatward in the latest event was a good example). However, my story is quite dialogue heavy, with three very different characters and this can be quite challenging for an actor performing a reading – how many different voices (accents, variations of delivery) can be juggled simultaneously in such a short time?
As did Alex Woodhall with his reading of my previous story, Sarah met the challenge brilliantly — each character has an unmistakable and convincing identity. This shouldn’t be surprising as Sarah is one of Liars’ League’s most regular actors and she’s also narrated many popular audiobooks, including the recent, bestselling Philippa Gregory novel, The White Princess.
Katy and Liam, who run the Liars’ League are also very insightful editors and directors: with their help the story also evolved considerably during the rehearsal – and afterwards. Its many contemporary references – mainly movie actors’ names – were batted around with alternative suggestions offered, even by email on the day of the performance itself.
We found it most difficult to settle on the heroine in Isabel’s pitch: a kick-ass, British submarine commander – you’ll need to watch or read the story before this makes much sense)
After going through countless others, we settled on Kate Winslet. There was something a little surreal — and metafictional — about how we ended up casting an imaginary lead role for a piece of fiction within a piece of fiction that itself was concerned with casting movie stars. Weird – but it didn’t raise any Sunset Boulevard mogul ambitions in me (although I wouldn’t mind living out in Santa Barbara again – the place where I was trained in screenwriting by a genuine Hollywood old-timer).
The story appeared to go down well with the audience – Sarah promptedlots of laughs (in the right places) from the audience, which included my friend Fay again plus ex-City University coursemates, Guy and Sue and Alison Burns, who ran the City University Certificate in Novel Writing (now the Novel Studio) at the time Sue, Guy and myself took the course.
The night went far too quickly and it was fantastic to see everyone – and to meet Jim Cogan – whose excellent and poignant story The Memory Man preceded Elevator Pitch. In fact, all the stories were entertaining and captivating and would repay anyone’s time watching, listening or reading them on the website or podcast.
I feel very lucky to have had two stories chosen recently (the selection is done anonymously, by the way) and the quality of the writing on the evening shows how difficult is the Liars task every month — picking from what obviously seems to be a sea of excellent submissions. It’s no wonder the event was recently voted one of the UK’s Top Ten Storytelling Nights by The Guardian.
I’m very surprised and delighted to have had another short story selected for Liars’ League London. It’s for the May theme of ‘Beginnings and Ends’ and the reading takes place on Tuesday 13th May at the Phoenix near Oxford Circus. The show starts at 7.30pm.
I went to the rehearsal last night and met the actress, Sarah Feathers, who’ll be reading the story, which is called Elevator Pitch. Sarah was fantastic in the read-through and I think she’ll put on a brilliant and entertaining performance.
Please come along — there’s another four great stories on the bill, which will satisfy all tastes, and there’s also the famous book quiz during the interval. It’s also a very social event with lots of like-minded literary fans enjoying the readings.
Details are on the Liars League website. (By the way, the pub serves food at the table during the performance so you can eat while listening if you like).
On Saturday I ventured into London on my first visit to The Word Factory – a monthly event which is described as being a ‘literary salon’ and has been highly recommended by a few writing friends. Literary salon is a fairly ambiguous term but, now I’ve been to one, it’s not a bad description of a varied and convivial evening with a group of people who enjoy getting together around a common love of literature and writing.
My main motivation for attending the April event was that one of the featured writers was Nick Royle, who keen readers of this blog may know (and my MMU course mates will know for definite) was our fiction writing tutor in the second year. However, as the route of the course that I took was the online version, I’d never met Nick (or even seen him in the flesh) before. In fact, I’d only heard him speak about a week or so before the Word Factory event when he was one of Ian McMillan’s guests on the BBC Radio 3 programme The Verb.
My Copy of Nick Royle’s latest novel — called First Novel.
So, having had an academic year’s worth of tutorials and web chat seminars with Nick, it was interesting to see what he looked and sounded like – and also fascinating to be on the other side of the table in some ways as he was invited to read a short story of his own at the event. Despite being a prolific writer of short stories (as well as several novels), this one wasn’t published anywhere else as Cathy Galvin, the Word Factory host, introduced it as only having been completed the day before. So we were a privileged bunch.
Rather than shrink into anonymity in the audience alongside the writing friends I’d happened to have bumped into (including fellow Lancastrian Pete Domican) I went up to Nick and introduced myself in what could best be described as the ‘interval’, although it was really a chance to chat over a glass of wine. I think he may have been mildly taken aback at being accosted by the physical manifestation of a previously online only presence but we had a pleasant chat and he asked me how the writing was coming along.
From my perspective, the fact I took the opportunity to meet Nick and introduce myself suggests that there’s possibly something significant in making the personal connection with someone who’s been offering feedback and advice on my writing – and it would be interesting to speculate if I’d have interpreted any aspects of the course differently had I been able to picture the tutors physically or read their written communication in the context of their voices and accents.
By coincidence on a related subject, during my last Metroland Poets meeting (also at the weekend) we workshopped some poems sent to us remotely by another poetry group based in Spain (fortunately the poems were written in English). Normally we have a system when workshopping each others’ work which functions quite well — the poet reads but must stay silent while the group discusses the poem (no questions and answers batted to and fro) and then gets a right of reply (or explanation) at the end of the debate.
With our Spanish counterparts not physically present, one of our members made the observation after we’d discussed two or three poems, that the tone of our debate was notably different to when a member sits mutely at the table during a normal discussion. This was true. Without feeling the need to be tactful, the comments tended to be blunter and more direct — that’s no reflection on the quality of the poems as they all had some considerable strengths.
It’s indisputable that no-one at a poetry group is likely to say ‘I hate this poem’ or ‘this poem is dreadful’ about the work of one of their members — I certainly wouldn’t want to be part of any writing group like that. However, having been part of a group’s discussions for a while, people can adjust for the collective politeness and understand the implications of faint praise along the lines of ‘I think this may need a little more work’ — or other typically English euphemisms.
And, of course, familiarity often leads to more candidness in the long run. Often the most useful feedback from readers is the most critical — ‘that doesn’t work’. But frank feedback can only be given in a trusted relationship — where the recipient knows that the comments are being made by someone who is sympathetic to the objectives of the writer (genre may be an example) and whose feedback will improve the work (i.e. knows what they’re talking about).
People will always have different tastes and there’s no point trying to mould work into a form with which a writer isn’t comfortable. This is probably what Hanif Kureishi meant in one of his notorious comments about creative writing courses: ‘You’ve got to try and find one teacher who can really help you.’ If I have time I’d like to blog at more length about his views which, as a soon-to-be MA Creative Writing graduate, I do have some sympathy with.
Personal relationships are also bound to influence the mechanics of the publishing trade, particularly in the way books are reviewed. Critics may well trouble their consciences less in inflicting witty put-downs on debut authors they’ve never met than an established author they’re likely to meet at some industry event. On the other hand, some reviewers may like to take an opportunity to puncture what they consider undeserved reputations — there are many simmering literary feuds conducted through the broadsheet review sections of which most ordinary readers are completely oblivious.
So while I think it’s perfectly practical to teach writing remotely (the OU offers some great writing courses exclusively online), it certainly gives a different perspective to meet the tutors in person (even the OU offers optional face-to-face sessions). I vaguely remember that MMU extends an invitation to online students to attend the social event that kicks off each academic year and, if time permits, I’d recommend going along to this to be able to put a face to a name at the start of the course — rather than six months after it finished, as in my case with Nick Royle.
Also on the Word Factory bill were K.J. Orr and A.L.Kennedy — referred to as Alison throughout the evening. Co-incidentally one of the set novels on the MMU reading list was A.L. Kennedy’s Paradise. I enjoyed the book’s wonderful prose and dark humour but its subject matter is pretty bleak — about the effects of alcoholism — and I was curious about the story that A.L.Kennedy would read and whether the subsequent interview might be a bit, well, worthy and hard-going.
How wrong could I be? The story extract was hilarious — mainly musings about the absurdity of what’s sold in a Canadian sex shop and she was a humorous, engaging and, for a well-known author, remarkably self-deprecating interviewee. Only later on, when it was mentioned in the interview, I remembered that, as well as writing, she’s also known for her sideline in comedy. On the basis of this enjoyable evening at the Word Factory it would be well worth catching one of her stand-up shows.
I’m privileged to be nominated to participate in the Blog Tour Monday project. I was passed the baton by my ex-MMU MA Creative Writing course mate, Anne Jensen, who blogged this post last Monday. Anne has also nominated her writer friend, Deborah Morgan, to contribute a stop on the tour in parallel (apparently termed the ‘other side’).
Anne was awarded her place in the relay team by another ex-MMU student, Kerry Hadley (who guest-blogged on Jo Nicel’s site). Kerry also nominated Matt Cresswell, another MMU alumnus, who also posted a blog last Monday. There is an illustrious line of bloggers who preceded Anne, Kerry and Matt on the tour – see Anne’s list of links in the introduction to her post.
The idea of the tour is to introduce ourselves and our blogs to whoever chooses to follow the excursion by answering four questions about our writing – I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do so as succinctly and wittily as my predecessors. As usual with my writing process I’ve left things right up until the deadline (it’s Sunday night) – oops that’s straying into Question 4. So I’d better start at the beginning.
What am I working on?
The novel – what else? I’ve been promising myself for about two years that it’s almost finished – and that was after starting the book a couple of years before that when I was on the City University Certificate in Novel Writing course. Since then the novel – called The Angel – has nourished a whole MA course – and then some.
Unfortunately for any Belbin completer–finisher impulses I might harbour, the creative writing course process has given me lots of reasons to do’ just that little bit more’. I completed a full manuscript for submission as the MA dissertation last October – MMU is one of the few MA courses that ends with submission of a full novel – but with the prospect of tutor feedback when it had been marked, I decided to wait until January to read the professional verdict (see previous posts on the blog) and make any changes accordingly.
Taking some of their useful comments into account, I’ve been making what I’m determined to be the absolutely final changes and then to move on to the half-finished novel that I ‘temporarily’ placed on hold when I started to develop ideas for The Angel.
But the novel isn’t everything I’ve worked on recently. I was fortunate enough to have a winning short story chosen by Liars League London this month. Liars League were featured as one of The Guardian’s Ten Great Storytelling Nights this weekend – it’s a fantastic evening out where actors read out the short stories in a brilliant way that the writers would never be able to compete with. A transcript of my story Do You Dare Me to Cross the Line? and the video of actor Alex Woodhall reading it at the event is currently right at the top of the Liars League homepage.
I enjoyed the experience so much I might try a competitions like that again.
How does my work differ from others in its genre?
Like probably most graduates of Creative Writing MA courses, I’ve always been a bit reluctant to single out my novel as being in a specific genre (which doesn’t help your chances of publication as genre is the first thing agents tend to think about). However, one ‘genre’ that people might associate with MA graduates definitely doesn’t fit my work — academic literary fiction. I’m probably a bit too lazy (see below) to attempt anything like tricksy meta-narration, post-structuralism and all that – not that anyone on the MA course was that pretentious .
Therefore one of the most useful pieces of feedback from the markers of my MA submission was to nail a genre. I was told that ‘at its heart [my novel] is a rather engaging love story’. I guess it is – in that it deals with a romantic relationship between its two protagonists.
Later this year I may find out definitively how my novel differs from others in the romance genre from true experts. It may astonish some people — it certainly does me — that I’m a now a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme (no mean feat as it’s exceptionally oversubscribed and, no, I don’t think they positively discriminated towards me based on my gender – I was just very quick to apply – spaces do almost as quickly as Kate Bush live show tickets are likely to do later this week).
The great thing about the RNA scheme is that your manuscript is given a critique by an experienced RNA reader. I’ll have to wait until I get the reader’s report back to be sure but I suspect most of the RNA’s members works won’t feature lots of wanton, late-night heavy drinking, heroines with fetish wardrobes, vicars dwelling on being beaten with metal combs, tattoos with plot significance, illicit substance consumption by canals in Hackney, World War Two re-enactments with condiments and a hero who has a virtual bromance over the airwaves with Jeremy Vine.
Why do I write what I do?
Some of it out of laziness again. My writing is mostly about the contemporary world because it saves me having to do any laborious research – although I often stray into the Internet nevertheless to check insignificant but seemingly monumental at the time facts like ‘Do they really offer a PGCE in Art at Goldsmiths University?’
And I tend to attempt to slip humour into almost everything I write – even when not obviously appropriate – perhaps because I need to amuse myself and make up for not being in the pub or doing something more sociable than writing on my own.
How does my writing process work?
Generally it tends to expand to fit the time available – which is why I like deadlines.
I can write fairly quickly – but then I’ll rewrite it – usually by annotating on paper copy and then again by reading out loud and then I’ll check for overused words against a spreadsheet I use and then print it again and – see why I like deadlines?
I write in all kinds of places – at home, at lunchtimes during the ‘day job’, on trains, even planes. And I do an awful lot of writing in my head – when I’m running or just daydreaming – it’s a good job I get on with my novel’s characters or I’d have been driven mad ages ago. Perhaps I get on so well with them I don’t want to leave them?
And as for ideas and inspiration – I just metaphorically shove stuff into my brain cells and hope it somehow all connects (see blog post).
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Now at this point, I should be naming who’s going to take the baton from me and do the Blog Tour Monday next week but, to my great shame, I’ve not managed to line anyone up – yet – but not for want of trying. It seems most of my writing blog friends have already just done the Blog Tour – or something very similar recently – but I’ll keep trying. Im waiting on a couple of responses. If you know me, write a blog and are reading this and would like to take part then get in touch with me asap.
So watch this space in the run up to next Monday to see if I pull a blog-writing friend out of the bag – so to speak.
My short story Do You Dare Me To Cross the Line? was selected as a winner for this month’s Liars’ League London event (see previous post for an account of its selection and the rehearsal).
It was performed last Tuesday evening by Alex Woodhall and, as the Liars video all the stories, the reading is now available on Youtube (along with the other four excellent stories by Ursula Dewey, Kassalina Boto, Philip Suggars and Eleanore Etienne (co-incidentally a fellow graduate of the City University Certificate in Novel Writing — now the Novel Studio).
The video is embedded below. It lasts just over fifteen minutes.
My story was the last on the bill, which meant me enduring an evening of nervous anticipation, although this was eased a little by my consumption of more than a couple of drinks on the house. I made such good use of this unexpected author benefit that I turned up at Marylebone station suddenly realising I’d lost an hour somewhere (chatting to the actors, other writers and organisers I think) so had to get the slow, stopping train and didn’t get home until nearly 1 am. The next day I felt like one of my characters the morning after the story’s night before.
I was very grateful for the company of several friends who came along to support me, including Rachel and Bren Gosling from the City course, my writer friend Fay and Sabina, the street art guru (see previous posts). There were a couple more people from the City course who were intending to come but who were beset by last-minute hold-ups.
It was a fantastic evening — the downstairs bar at the Phoenix was packed-out. I reckon there were well over a hundred people. I needn’t have fretted about the reception for my story — Alex read with such verve and superb comic timing that the audience’s attention seemed to be seized for the whole fifteen minutes it took to reach its climax — and with plenty of laughs heard along the way (thankfully I didn’t imagine them — they’re on the video).
I was flattered afterwards to receive some enthusiastic compliments about the story, not only from friends (Bren wrote me a wonderfully congratulatory email) but also from some encouraging comments made via Twitter and Facebook. And the story’s characters appeared to have been vivid enough to pass the crucial ‘what happened next?’ test. I bumped into one of the other authors on the tube on the way back and she asked me ‘Did they go on to have sex? I think they did.’ If you want to see if you agree with her then listen to the story — I’d be very interested in blog readers’ opinions.
Having a winning story for the Liars League would be great news at any time but it was particularly welcome for me at present — a couple of months after the much-anticipated results of the MA novel dissertation — when I’m still wrestling with a few changes to the end of the novel prompted by the feedback. It’s also been five months since the MA draft of the novel was handed in — so it’s been brilliant to had have this event to give real impetus to my writing.
I can also draw some motivation because, while it’s a self-contained work, Do You Dare Me To Cross The Line? perhaps unsurprisingly shares similarities with the novel: genre, setting, brand of humour. While the narrative perspective is different –it’s first-person, present tense — the dynamics between the characters are reminiscent of some scenes in the novel — the tensions and awkwardness of trying to guess the intentions of others whom one cares about — or wants to. That the story was picked as a winner and enjoyed apparently positive reaction of the audience encourages me to think there’s a market for more — at least a novel’s worth I hope.
Besides the thrill of hearing my words read expertly by a professional, the Liars League experience also allowed me to get some insight into my writing from a refreshing and almost unique perspective. One of the great mysteries of the writing process is that all readers interpret fiction in their own personal way — a skilled author employs words economically enough to communicate the essence of the story’s action while prompting the reader’s imagination to invoke scenery and background.
It’s an exceptionally difficult balancing act: too little exposition and the reader will fail to grasp vital elements of the narrative; too much detail and the pace will falter and the reader will be swamped and bored — and in a short story there are far fewer words than a novel to play with.
Working with the Liars League actor and editors, and also sitting in the audience and observing the reaction of people hearing the story for the first time, provided valuable insights into what worked in my story and what didn’t — and also how the Liars had imagined the action, setting and characters. While the event is a reading, the actors can dress to some degreein costume and their delivery, spoken and non-verbal, projects their own interpretation of character, particularly for first person narratives.
It is, therefore, rather the opposite of the sort of forensic collective copy-edit of prose that risk bogging down Creative Writing workshopping sessions (‘I’m really not convinced by that comma). Nor, because the story has won through the selection procedures, will it be the kind of creative writing workshopping experience when, for the best of intentions, workshoppers’ suggestions extend a little past the scope of a structural edit: it would be great if turned your shy, sensitive artist character into a grizzled Scottish trawlerman possessed by an alien or why not relocate your novel from a Deptford loft apartment to a Roman gladiatorial amphitheatre? ‘It’ll up the conflict and sense of place’.
Slight exaggeration, perhaps, but in a workshop the written text can be seen as something malleable and interactive — when it’s read out loud as a story it seems much more fixed psychologically.
Often writers are asked to read out their own prose in Creative Writing workshops before it is discussed — this was the way the City University Certificate worked, although I don’t know how the Novel Studio handles it. This has its merits — certainly reading out loud exposes clumsiness in phrasing and the rhythm of the prose that often lies undetected when read silently on the page — I always read drafts of my novel out loud for that reason. Reading a piece in a class also ensures that any less conscientious students, who’ve not prepared properly, will know what’s goingabout to be discussed.
Nevertheless, a writer who has an aptitude for reading out loud will always breathe extra life into prose whereas a hesitant, self-conscious monotone will muffle the merits of the word on the page (most writers I know tend slightly towards the latter). Also, a writer will always know his or her own intentions — where to place the emphasis, what type of voice or accent to use for a character or narrator — even if this isn’t evident on the page and, consequently, not communicated to a reader of the written word.
If a piece is to be read out loud in a Creative Writing workshop, I prefer it to be read by another student. This lets the writer hear the words spoken by a reader new to the work and takes away any direction that’s not explicit from the text itself. It gives an insight into how an ordinary reader might encounter the writing on the page.
That’s why Liars League was so illuminating. From my experience at the rehearsal (see previous post) Katy Darby and Liam Hogan, the editors, had clearly made a connection with the voice in the narrative and cast Alex in the part accordingly. It was very satisfying to me, as the writer, that they’d also picked up the subtle dynamics between the three principal characters, even when this was only hinted at with a line or two in the story. The changes they suggested to the text served to increase clarity and remove ambiguity.
Alex also made contributions of the type a reader might unconsciously add to the text. He’d decided the character Anja was Icelandic — which I thought was a great — there’s nothing in the text to suggest any nationality beyond her name and the rhythm of her speech. He also used some great comic timing to emphasise lines that I’d hoped might raise some amusement if read as I’d intended by an ordinary reader but, when spoken to an audience, raised a proper laugh — the ‘distressed [BEAT] brick’ being a great example.
(One of the advantages of writing plays or screenplays is the ability to add in [BEAT]s or other direction that’s not seen by the audience.)
Despite having written the words, it was a process of discovery for me to see how the story came alive in the minds of other people. The imaginary world of the story as viewed through the lens of Alex’s performance was different to what I’d envisaged while writing it — but that’s the magical property of fiction — everyone has their own interpretation.
So while it was an honour and a great pleasure to have my story selected and read by the Liars’ League, I also learned a surprising amount from the experience about my writing, how it’s interpreted by other people and how I can improve it. And it’s for that reason, as well as being a great literary night out in the pub, that I’d wholeheartedly recommend other writers submit their short stories to the Liars — either for truth or dare.
I’m thrilled and very excited that a short story of mine (called Do You Dare Me To Cross The Line) has been selected as one of the Liars’ League’s winning entries for their March reading event.
It takes place on Tuesday this week (11th March) at 7.30pm at the Phoenix pub at 37, Cavendish Square, London, near Oxford Circus. There are five stories in the reading and, with a common theme of Truth or Dare, all promise to be extremely entertaining. Please do come along (it’s £5 on the door), listen to some excellent readings and say hello to me. Full details are here on the Liars’ League London website.
For those who aren’t familiar with Liars’ League, it’s a collaboration between authors and actors — a mutually beneficial arrangement which gives each the chance to showcase their skills by making use of the talent of the other. So professional actors bring their training and experience in performing, while the authors provide new and original writing.
Liars’ League is a prestigious and well-known fixture in the London literary circuit (and has associated events elsewhere in the world and the UK). (I was contacted before I’d had chance to email anyone with the news by Emily Pedder, who runs City University’s The Novel Studio course — whose predecessor course I took in 2009/10. One of my fellow graduates described the Liars’ League as ‘really famous’.) I found, via their website, that Katy Darby, who’s organising this month’s event, spoke about the short story as a form on Radio 4’s The World Tonight at the end of last year — pretty authoritative I’d say.
I first encountered the Liars’ League about a year ago when I attended the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook short story competition awards at the Bloomsbury Institute, where the top three prizewinning entries were given readings by members of the League’s company of actors.
Videos of all the performances and texts of the stories are published after each event on the Liars’ League website and I’ll post a link from this blog as soon as Tuesday’s become available.
While I’m relieved it’s not me standing up and reading out loud, I’m still starting to feel nervous about how an audience will respond to the story: will it grab their attention; will they pick up on any hints or clues; will they laugh in the right places? (FYI, if you’re planning on being in the audience there are bits that are deliberately meant to be funny!) They’re the kind of questions about your reader’s response that you wonder about as a fiction writer but you rarely have the opportunity to discover the answers first hand.
By contrast, one of an actor’s core skills is to thrive on live interaction with an audience and to exploit their experience in delivering the material. And having attended the rehearsal for Liars’ League in London last night I’m sure my story’s in excellent hands. It’s being read by actor Alex Woodhall whose interpretation of the story and phrasing of the narrative and dialogue provided a captivating and enthralling perspective.
I was also impressed and flattered by how Katy Darby and the rest of the Liars’ League editorial team perfectly grasped the underlying dynamics between the characters and suggested small but perceptive changes to improve the impact of the story. I’ll say no more because the proof will be on the evening itself and in the subsequent video.
I’ll blog later about the evening’s experience but, despite the nervousness, I’m looking forward to it hugely. I know a number of friends (some of whom have been mentioned on the blog) have said they’ll try to get along and I’d love anyone else to come along who might enjoy a great night of literary entertainment.
The last post loosely took the E.M.Forster quotation ‘only connect’ and asked if this might be at the basis of some of the creative process — can originality be fostered by stuffing your subconscious full of stimulating ideas and experiences which could stew away unsupervised like a warming winter casserole or, alternatively, blast into each other like a psychological Hadron collider.
Bearing this out, I’ve realised there’s a loosely recurring theme of odd and unusual connections in many of the experiences I’ve enjoyed or places I’ve visited over the past few months — locations which are on the margins between conflicted forces or genres where conventionally opposing styles or materials have been placed in opposition.
Shoreditch is the classic example of an area that has been transformed by the influence of artists, with the Village Underground tube train carriages providing a landmark juxtaposition.
Village Underground from Shoreditch
It’s arguable that Shoreditch has become so ironically commercialised that it’s developing into a caricature of itself. For several years, artists have been priced out of the area (as is Kim in my novel), not just by the geek-cool spillover from David Cameron’s beloved ‘Tech City’ in Old Street but by speculative apartment-buying business types (even more beloved of Cameron).
The warehouse-squatting, loft-dwelling artists have been dispersed to Peckham (mentioned in Time Out virtually every week), Hackney Wick (whose artists ‘took over’ the V&A at the end of February) and rather bizarrely, as I discovered a few weeks ago, to suburbs like High Barnet.
I climbed four storeys up an external fire-escape with my friends from Love Art London way out in the hipster-there-be-dragons territory of zone 6 to visit the artist, David Shillinglaw. He was a thoroughly generous and entertaining host, welcoming us into his loft studio which was located in an old false-teeth making factory (if it was in a novel this detail would seem way too far-fetched!). The studio was an amazing jumble of finished artworks, pieces in progress, plants (the tree apparently belonged once to Bob Hoskins!), huge rubber balls, artists materials and cats plus everyday objects (I think he lived there too — David Shillinglaw, not Bob Hoskins).
Inside David Shillinglaw’s High Barnet Loft Studio
While the artists move to the likes of Stoke Newington, Deptford and, er, High Barnet, property developers haven’t been slow to make the connection between exploiting the lingering aura of edgy cool and the large plots of under-exploited land in Shoreditch. Schemes that have been approved are in the pipeline that will transform the area irreparably: a 40 storey tower is to be built almost opposite Village Underground with a new shopping centre on the other side.
I may have written a partially historical novel by accident as I have scenes in my novel set in Holywell Street, which will be completely transformed within the next couple of years. (The scene is set in the road between the Village Underground tube trains and the new high rise building in the centre left in the developer’s projected image below.)
The Planned ‘Shoreditch Village’ Either Side of the Railway Viaduct on the Existing Surface Car Park Opposite Village Underground (Below Left) — from www.ellis-miller.com
Speaking of developers trying to muscle-in (and, in so doing, destroy) on ‘cool’, ‘gritty’ urban locations, I took the photograph below just before Christmas of one of the most bizarre connections in London — the South Bank’s Bavarian Christmas market set opposite the graffiti-plastered undercroft of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, adopted as London’s skateboarders’ spiritual home.
Drinking steaming glühwein while watching skateboard jumps in a reclaimed space of brutalist architecture is the type of accidentally cosmopolitan experience only London can offer. Unlike some of the most favoured spots for Shoreditch street artists, the undercroft has been reprieved from development into shops.
There are a quite a few posts on this blog that mention street art: in the novel Kim brings her graffiti artist skills to places that haven’t traditionally welcomed them. Perhaps its appeal is partly because of another unusual combination — the traditionally reverential and formal world of fine art and the constantly changing, chaotic, almost anarchic urban spaces that foster street art culture.
My friend Sabina Andron, who runs the I Know What I Like Meetup Group in London, is studying street art for a PhD at University College, London. Over a period of 100 days last year she conducted an intriguing initiative, photographing the same stretches of wall on Leake Street (a virtual tunnel underneath Waterloo station) every day over a month and recording the organic, rapid changes in the artwork.
One of Sabina Andron’s Leake Street Photos — Click on the links in the blog text for the full animation
Writing, art and geography are, of course, not the only areas in which ‘only connect’ produces exciting and unusual innovations. Musicians often cross-fertilise, with many whole new genres created from the fusion of apparently unrelated styles. In my local pub the recent English graduate cellarman often exposes the village regulars to his eclectic musical tastes, gained from working at music festivals across Europe. It’s a bizarre experience to walk into a rural English pub and hear dub reggae by the likes of King Tubby flowing from the speakers.
I was having a drink in the pub recently and began to recognise a song I knew very well but was also simultaneously unfamiliar. I worked out it was a track from Dark Side of the Moon. The skanky,offbeat rhythms meant it definitely wasn’t Pink Floyd but it was surprisingly good — like any good, radical cover version, making the song sound written as if it was specifically for the other genre.
The track was Time and the album was the brilliant Dub Side of the Moon (see above) by the Easy All Stars. I bought it straight away and now listen to it interchangeably with the Pink Floyd original.
And foodies can give musicians a run for their money in terms of matching up bizarre combinations. Food is a major feature of the novel (including the odd matches inspired by the likes of Heston Blumenthal — liquorice ice-cream, snail porridge, mango and douglas-fir puree and the rest). So, wanting to see something of the cutting edge for myself, at the end of last year I visited the Experimental Food Society Spectacular at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.
This was an event run by people who like to do weird things with food. Some exhibits were immersive experiences — exploring how story-telling could influence flavours or how different senses interacted with each other. Some were just a bit, well, bonkers. Let’s connect Italian food with an Italian evocation of place by building a model of Rialto Bridge in Venice purely out of dried pasta and crackers (it can be done — see below — although I’m not sure whether an arrabbiata or puttanesca sauce would go best with the balustrades or portico).
Experimental Food — Top and bottom right: The Rialto Bridge made of pasta and crackers; Bottom left: Vapourised tea.
The flasks in the photo above left are of different types of tea but you don’t drink it. You inhale it (with a straw) after the people from Camellia’s Tea House put the brew through some clever vaporisation process. The vapour actually condenses on the back of your tongue, which gives a different taste sensation but one I doubt will be replacing the English cuppa very soon. (The breathable tea was so odd the story even made it into the New York Post.)
I’m not sure my fictional pub will go as far as serving its drinks in gaseous form, however intriguing the idea. But with an artist on the premises it could offer something for breakfast similar to the work of another Experimental Food Spectacular exhibitor — Dermot Flynn — Toast Artist.
Dermot Flynn — Toast Artist
A little like a street artist, Dermot Flynn, connects art with unusual surfaces — in his case toast (a look at his website shows that he works by no means exclusively in toast but it’s one of the more unusual way he earns a crust). Love it or hate it, the genre of edible art means it’s unpalatable to use conventional paint, so he uses Marmite instead.
Apparently if the Marmite is applied to white bread (presumably the more manufactured and sterile the better) to create an image which is subsequently put into a toaster, the desiccation process means the picture (or toast) will last for an indefinite period. If you can resist eating your artwork, Dermot told me that it’s perfectly possible to frame it.
For £10, I couldn’t resist the offer of having my portrait created in this unusual medium but I’ve taken the precaution of photographing it in case of unexpected nibbling.
My English teacher in the sixth form introduced me to ‘only connect’ — the famous E.M.Forster quotation — not the addictive BBC4 quiz show with Victoria Coren (although the latter is inspired by the former). The implications of those two words have made a lasting impression on me.
Actually, the quotation (from Howard’s End) is elaborated into a longer phrase that has a more specific literary meaning than the more common interpretations of its first two words: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest.’
However, I prefer to apply the phrase to connections in the more general sense — specifically creating or uncovering connections between often surprising subjects, which is what the quiz programme is all about. It’s also how the brain works at the most fundamental level — thoughts being the result of connections between synapses and neurons (yes, I did have to check that on Wikipedia).
Consequently, there’s a large school of thought that suggests creativity and innovation are largely the product of making connections between unlikely ideas — and that the more original the idea the more unusual and hidden is the connection between the two.
Only Connect — the Miners’ Strike with Acid House. Detail from Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass
Much narrative is driven by the dissonance (and consequent creation of connections) between two (or more) ostensibly opposing situations or premises — vampires or wizards exist in the modern world, what if historical events had turned out differently, someone new comes to town (especially if it’s an alien or werewolf) and so on. Metaphor and simile, which are ways of making surprising connections, are the wellspring of imaginative writing.
And all love stories are fundamentally about creating of connections between two people — and the more unlikely the better. This is the premise of my novel: two people from very different backgrounds and who thought they wanted very different things happen to meet and they connect — although how intimately and lastingly is for the reader to discover.
The novel also connects the conflicting lifestyles of City financiers and bohemian artists, inner-city London and the bucolic English countryside and the aesthetic pleasures of art with the sensual satisfaction of food.
I also like to think Forster’s maxim works at the subconscious level too — that all the experiences you have and the information you absorb get filed away in your memory somewhere and start to connect and form new ideas without any conscious effort.
This might be why a common piece of writing advice is to put a notepad by the bed to capture the seemingly random pieces of imagination or association that sometimes surface in the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I’ve almost trained myself to slumber into this semi-conscious state when commuting on the train — and I’ve often emailed myself ideas or phrases that seemed worth noting and might have been forgotten otherwise.
It’s not ‘write what you know’ but I’m of the belief that the more experience and information you use to fertilise your mind then the more chance there is of all those neurons and synapses bearing fruit with some connections that are really interesting.
Old London Connects with the New: the City from Deptford
By contrast, I sometimes wonder what the sort of writer who lives like a hermit finds to write about — are they constantly drawing on childhood experiences or perhaps they find enough inspiration from secondary sources?
However, having had a ‘day job’ that’s delivered me into central London for a few years, I’ve tried to take the opportunity to load up my own brain cells. I’ve tried to do something new every day if work time and the weather have allowed. (On a warm summer day I’ve taken advantage of the nearby park and laid out on the grass for half an hour — rationalising I’m letting ideas subconsciously ferment!)
Of course, it’s not necessary to go to London to load up your brain cells but there’s so much (often free) access to huge sources of cultural stimulation that it’s very easy to do so. When the weather’s not been kind enough for sunbathing — oops I mean meditating — then I’ve met up with friends or taken myself off on walks or lunchtime visits to of museums and galleries.
I recently discovered the charming Geffrye museum in Hoxton, which is particularly atmospheric when its living rooms through the ages are decorated for Christmas. Only last week I viewed the National Gallery’s side-by-side Van Gogh’s Sunflowers exhibition and it cost nothing to do so. (Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass, mentioned above, is also free as part of the Tate Britain’s Walk Through British Art exhibition).
There are also the many special exhibitions held at the various galleries — I visited the Richard Hamilton exhibition at the Tate Modern last week in its first couple of days and before any reviews had been published, which made them all the more interesting when I read them.
I should make particular mention of the brilliant Only in England photographic exhibition in its last few weeks at the Science Museum. It features Tony Ray-Jones’s spontaneous pictures of English eccentricity (I’m desperate to find a print of the Whitstable Bay lovers on the boat trip) along with Martin Parr’s poignant photographs of isolated 1970s Yorkshire communities (actually near Hebden Bridge — not far from where I was brought up).
St. Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge
And with two thousand years of recorded history, London itself is full of connections between old and new, especially in the areas around the City and the East-End and docklands — with possibly the best example the fabulous Millennium Bridge creating a spectacular connection between St. Paul’s Cathedral (which occupies a very ancient site) with the Tate Modern building, an icon of post-industrial transformation and one of the largest-scale examples of how artists have taken over what were once resolutely functional and non-decorative buildings and neighbourhoods (see forthcoming post).
While I like the serendipity of walking aimlessly around the city, I’ve also used various books of guided walks to explore areas I’d never routinely visit. Steven Millar’s two volumes of London’s Hidden Walks have been particularly inspiring. I’ve wandered with his books in hand around Soho, St. James’s, Marylebone, Clerkenwell, the City, Temple, Westminster, Chelsea and Covent Garden.
I’ve also explored areas further off the beaten track like Whitechapel, Lambeth and Vauxhall (where I discovered the fascinating enclave around Bonnington Square Garden), Rotherhithe and Deptford (see the spectacular view in the photograph above).
The Cross Bones Graveyard, Southwark
One of the most poignant sites I’ve discovered while walking around London was on the walk around the South Bank and Southwark. The site of the Crossbones Graveyard contains the unmarked graves of 15,000 children and prostitutes — those who for hundreds of years until the mid-nineteenth century weren’t considered worthy of a burial inside the boundaries of the grounds of the Winchester Palace and Southwark Cathedral . The graveyard’s existence was only discovered when the Jubilee Line was constructed in the 1990s. It has now become a shrine for modern day sex workers — with memorial ribbons tied to the gates. It’s still a derelict site owned by London Transport and campaigners are trying to resist development plans and preserve the area as a memorial.
In common with others I’ve found wandering London, it’s a touching and surprising story and will lodge in my mind for a long time. In years to come, might the memory of this walk randomly cross-fertilise with some snatch of conversation, a recalled art exhibition or museum exhibit — and out of my subconscious might emerge some original idea or compelling concept might bubble its way out of my subconscious? Who knows? In any case, it’s great reward in itself to cram all this material in my mind in the first place.
UPDATE 9th March 2014: A photographer I met at The Other Art Fair last year, Maria Konstanse Bruun (who’s from Norway but based in the UK) posted this article on her Facebook page. It’s from the Huffington Post and is a list of the 18 behaviours that apparently mark out creative people from others. I certainly recognise many in myself: daydreaming, observing people, liking solitude, seeking out new experiences (see the above post), losing track of time and, of course, ‘connecting the dots’. It’s well worth a read.
Well, I did it. This week I received an email from Manchester Metropolitan University giving me the excellent news that my dissertation had made the grade — i.e. the draft of the novel I submitted in early October (see previous posts) had been through the double marking process from two lecturers not involved in its supervision and had been awarded what I consider a rather damned good grade.
I also received a commentary from the markers on what they saw as the strengths and weaknesses of the novel. This was very illuminating and far more thought-provoking than just receiving a raw mark.
While I’m not officially an MA in Creative Writing yet — we have to wait for some external moderation and the ratification to the examinations committee — I now know that I’ve completed and passed all the modules required for the formalities to be completed in the summer.
As mentioned above, I was very happy — and very relieved — with my mark but I’m not going to go into detail about it on the blog. Apart from anything else, I’m not convinced that creative writing can be marked with the same exactitude as other academic subjects — I’d suggest its subjective nature may account for a wider margin of error than many other courses.
I’ll share a few selected excerpts from the feedback I was given, although this will be in true blurb writers’ style. The comments that I received were a snappily entertaining read in themselves, although verging on the sort of writerly self-consciousness that was in danger of parodying the creative writing tutor who wants to keep dazzling the students by example.
Naturally the feedback mentioned a few points about the novel that the examiners thought could be improved (after all there are very few perfect novels) but, fortunately, I was already aware that a few areas needed work when the deadline loomed, especially when I had to switch out of structural edit mode and into proof editing (which seems to have worked OK as there were no comments on presentation, etc.).
The feedback had a pretty accurate distillation of the novel’s premise: ‘The Angel is, at its core, a love story, and it is the suspense and tension of the illicit desire (and friendship) between City trader and would-be chef James and edgy Hoxton artist Kim that animates the novel.’ (Strictly speaking, Kim doesn’t live or work in Hoxton but it’s a generic shorthand for the areas she does move around in at the start of the novel.)
There are approving comments about some of the novel’s satirical targets: ‘a place of trashy TV, PowerPoint presentations for jargon-benumbed corporate drones…and vacuous materialism.’ The markers seemed to enjoy that ‘the City and the moronic lexicon of corporate Human Resources come in for a well-deserved kicking’ but they also appreciate that the novel needs to balance its satire with humanity and point out that authenticity ‘is to be found in the two principal protagonists’ with the novel having ‘an edgy affection for James and Kim’. It concludes that it is ‘a rather engaging love story’.
What’s most complimentary about the feedback is that the examiners see the characters as real, three-dimensional people with whom readers can empathise — to the point of being teased by ‘erotic tension’ as the characters pursue their attraction with each other.
Being told that I’ve created characters who engage with each other so vividly that and the reader feels their sexual attraction is a compliment worth more than anything connected with more overt or showy literary techniques or pyrotechnics. It’s this identification that keeps people reading and makes them care about what happens next. It’s almost magical and I’m not sure that MA courses can teach this innate skill — nor to be able to precisely analyse how the process works — but it’s good that the two anonymous but undoubtedly well-read and highly qualified writers have said that this works in my novel.
So I’ll take the comments and appropriate changes to the manuscript where necessary but overall, it’s time for a celebratory drink. It’s a shame I can’t walk into The Angel and buy a round for Anne, Kerry and Claire whom I know have also passed their dissertation and will become fellow MA graduates in the summer. A virtual raised glass will have to suffice. Here’s to more occasions to toast for our class of 2013.
And I’m wondering where on earth did 2013 go? Certainly not writing lots of blog posts — it’s been a very lax six weeks since the last update — but if I get this post published today then I’ll at least have posted a blog entry in each month of the year.
Writing more frequent (and shorter) blog posts will have to be one of 2014’s New Year resolutions. I’ve had several absolutely fascinating (he says) posts mulling in my mind over the past few months but I’ve not found time to commit them to cyberspace.
At this reflective time, it’s tempting to look back and wonder what happened during the preceding 365 days. In many ways I’m doing the same day-to-day as I have for the last few years. I’m still writing, tweeting and doing a day-job. I’ve been enjoying my time in London as much as I did at in 2012 (when I wrote a post last New Year’s Eve celebrating what a remarkable experience 2012 in London had been).
I started this blog in earnest in January 2010 — when its principal purpose was to follow my progress through the City University Certificate in Novel Writing. I doubt that I’d have expected to be still blogging about my continuing development as a fiction writer — three years of an MA following the City course would have seemed a long slog back then.
So, in some ways it seems that little is different but these are probably the most superficial. In a deeper sense this blog has recorded much more profound changes — the huge amount I’ve learned about writing, how the skills I’ve developed have matured and how my perspective is much better aligned to the commercial realities and demands of the publishing world.
I spent time this summer revising some of the first sections of the novel. These were written back in 2010 and, while reading the material was surprisingly pleasurable, I feel I’ve improved as a writer very significantly.
And, as well as learning and honing a craft, I’ve enjoyed some brilliantly sociable and stimulating times with so many other creative people along the way.
I’ve been so busy that it’s easy to lose sight of two major achievements that happened in 2013: I finished my three-year MA Creative Writing course and, in doing so, completed as good a draft of my novel as possible. Sure it would benefit from some more work — I’m sure virtually all writers would like to polish their work were it not for deadlines — but I’ve reached that fundamental milestone.
And it’s a novel that I’m proud of having written — with characters I haven’t tired of in over three years (the emotional wrench of saying goodbye to them is the flip side of this coin) and imho the novel says many things worth saying about life in contemporary Britain. Possibly the best compliment of the 2013 was when one of our ex-City writing group, who’s not afraid to be critical, read the whole manuscript and said it was ‘a terrific read’.
Completing a novel is such a massive undertaking that I have huge respect for anyone else who shows the necessary qualities of perseverance, motivation and self-belief required, especially if fitting it in around work or other commitments. That’s in addition to any innate writing ability. I don’t particularly agree with the aphorisms often tweeted that suggest that talent is commonplace whereas it’s hard work that’s rare but completing a novel is a certainly a slog that requires a lot of sacrifice.
I’ve been careful to say I finished the MA course — another achievement in persistence — but I’m yet to find out if I’ve passed. I’ll get the official results in June so hopefully, this time in 2014 I can say I’m in possession of a Masters degree in Creative Writing.
Now the course is over, it’s probably fair to say that, for all of us, taking a long course like an MA or the year-long City Certificate (now Novel Studio) isn’t the fastest way to write a novel. There’s a lot of time spent on absorbing best practice from established writers’ texts, workshopping and critiquing with other students, engaging in discussion, learning about aspects of the publishing industry, writing in other forms (as I did for my screenplay in the MA) and writing assignments. It’s surprising there’s enough time left to even make a start on the novel. However, all who complete these courses should emerge much better equipped to go on to write more successfully in the long-term.
We’re promised feedback on our completed novels in mid-January. This seemed a rather distant date when I submitted the novel in early October, when my instinct was to try to finish work on it and move on to something new as soon as possible. However, if the forthcoming feedback is as comprehensive as the university have suggested then I guess I ought to be prepared to go back to the manuscript and act on any recommendations. The novel should have been read by at least two markers and also externally moderated so a fresh perspective will be really valuable (especially when compared with the cost of other manuscript appraisal services).
The Vine (or Bull and Bladder), Brierley Hill (none of the above is Kerry!)
And I finally met up with one of my virtual coursemates. About six weeks after the novel submission deadline I was in Birmingham visiting some classic pubs with friends and took a detour to the Black Country to have a very pleasant chat in person with Kerry Hadley. We met, appropriately for my novel, at a famous pub — The Vine in Brierley Hill — otherwise known as the Bull and Bladder. What a spectacular sunset too. I’m sure that during 2014 a publisher would like to snap up Kerry’s excellent novel from the MA course. Maybe I’ll finally get to meet up with Anne in 2014 — another who survived until the bitter end?
Sunset Over Brierley Hill, November 2013
So if 2013 was about completing the novel and the MA course. 2014’s resolutions are going to be about trying to get it published — a process that’s probably going to be long, difficult, frustrating — the archetypical emotional roller-coaster. Time to develop a thick, calloused skin? As mentioned previously, I’m not going to catalogue the submission saga on the blog. However, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the process at networking events like the York Festival of Writing (where I received some excellent one-to-one feedback from a couple of agents), London Writers’ Cafe (I slurped a large G&T at the Christmas party) and London Writers’ Club. I’ve also exchanged notes with many other writers over Twitter and email so I have a reasonably informed idea of which agents I perhaps ought to approach. In most cases I’ve seen the agents speak or had short conversations with them myself, which makes the process less daunting (or perhaps more so in some cases).
(Having said that, should an agent I’ve not met or listened to stumble across this blog is interested in reading some of the novel then please get in touch!)
2013 has also been tremendously encouraging for me as several writing friends and acquaintances have achieved success — showing that signing with an agent and getting a book published happens to people who’ve followed a similar route to myself. I wrote a post in the late summer about the great news of Rick Kellum from my City course being signed by Juliet Mushens. I heard recently that Bren Gosling, also from the City course, and who’s often commented on this blog, has also been taken on by a leading literary agency.
Also, Isabel Costello (who I last saw at Anastasia Parkes’s ‘interesting session’ at the York Festival of Writing — see post below) of the excellent On the Literary Sofa blog I’ve mentioned on this site, has also recently been signed by Diana Beaumont of Rupert Heath for her debut novel. In all the above cases, I know the writers have worked extremely hard on revising and reworking their novels over a long period and their achievements are very well deserved.
A few weeks ago I also met with Jennifer Gray from the City course who’s been working extremely hard on her rapidly growing number of children’s books. In 2013 she had the fantastic news of being shortlisted for the Waterstones’ Children’s Book Prize for Atticus Claw Breaks the Law — the first of the Atticus series. A search for Jennifer Gray on the Waterstones website comes up with at least ten books — including the Guinea Pigs online series and the intriguing Chicken series which will be published in 2014.
Talking to Jennifer has given me an insight into the commercial demands of the publishing world — with deadlines for submitting, revising and proofing new titles stretching many months ahead. She’s also a practising barrister and has a family so I’m in awe of her industry — again another example that, in addition to talent, published writers need to put in a lot of hard work. In my case, with course deadlines no longer a factor, I perhaps need that sort of external discipline to give me a kick up the backside every so often (not that Jennifer needs one herself, I’m sure).
St. James’s Park — Where Parts of the Novel Were Written in the Summer
Like many other writers, I’ve also been juggling the demands of the ‘day job’ with making time for writing — which often feels like I’m burning the candle at both ends — sometimes trying to eke out time to write from what’s available in the rest of the day, even maybe a token effort of writing a few sentences.
In many ways the writing is like taking on a second job — one with a long, unpaid apprenticeship except with myself as boss to sporadically crack the whip. It often seems I have to snatch time to write: on the train, at lunchtimes (sometimes in St. James’s Park), unearthly hours of the day and night and at the expense of more conventional weekend pursuits (such as the urgent repairs required to my disintegrating garden shed — I’m sure Roald Dahl’s famous writing shed didn’t have a gaping hole in the roof).
A Mobile Writing ‘Office’ run by Chiltern Railways
Nevertheless, I’ve managed to write tens of thousands of words in 2013 — and also cut several thousand too in the process of editing, revising and proofing a completed draft. I must have found a writing routine that’s sufficiently accommodating. Of course, it remains an ambition to make writing bring in enough income so that I can have some dedicated, professional writing time. On the other hand, I guess putting in so many hours up to this point shows how much I must enjoy writing for its own sake and also my belief that this work will pay off in the long run.
So I start 2014 hoping that this might be the year that all that time writing and studying will pay dividends. Whatever happens I’m looking forward to starting to write the new novel that I’ve been writing in my head and jotting down ideas for while completing The Angel.
But to see in the New Year I’m going to do some well-earned research — and, considering the main setting of the novel, where else to do it but in the local village pub? I even wrote a scene in the summer set at The Angel’s chaotic New Year’s party. I hope no-one’s end of year celebrations are quite as bizarre as my fictional pub’s musical celebration — singer-songwriter Jason’s ‘whiny-voiced set about dusky maidens and mysterious sex beasts’.
So good luck and the best of wishes to everyone who’s read the blog or who whose company I’ve enjoyed in any writing-related (or other) way during the last twelve months. Let’s look forward to 2014 and hope it brings all of us something of what we’re hoping for.
As well as being the title of the novel, The Angel is also the name of the pub at the centre of the narrative. It’s a fictional village local somewhere in the Chilterns and, is a little like George Orwell’s famous Moon Under Wateras it’s something of an idealised English country pub (at least in its appearance — thatched, whitewashed, low-beams, inglenooks, flagstoned floors). As mentioned previously, it’s not based on one particular pub but everything in it is an amalgam of real characteristics of about a dozen pubs in the Chilterns that I know very well.
Of course, the physical appearance of a pub is only part of its appeal — the set where personal dramas are played out. As anyone who’s visited more than a few pubs knows (in the country or city), it’s doesn’t take that much searching to come across some very idiosyncratic features — or strange activities that occur in otherwise ‘normal’ pubs.
Only a few days ago I visited a pub I’ve known for a while called England’s Rose in Postcombe, which isn’t that far from M40 junction 6. I’d naively assumed that the pub had borne that name for centuries but no — it was renamed from The Feathers almost exactly 16 years ago in 1997 after — you’ve guessed it — Elton John’s reworking of Candle in the Wind at Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral. The pub had been converted into a shrine to Lady Di.
We were given a tour by the licensees. There was a whole bookcase of Diana-related literature in the main bar but the restaurant extension was where the Diana memorabilia had been most concentrated. Sadly quite a lot of the souvenirs had been thinned out in recent years but there are still rare photographs on the wall apparently presented by Mohammed Al Fayed.
In a similar vein, although there is more of a geographical connection, the Red Lion in Knotty Green near Beaconsfield has celebrated the life of probably its most successful writer — the phenomenal Enid Blyton.
From the Imagination of Probably Beaconsfield’s Biggest Selling Author
I say ‘probably’ because Terry Pratchett is said to have been brought up in the area, although he may have lived closer to the spectacularly ancient Royal Standard of England in nearby Forty Green. Huge though Terry Pratchett’s sales are, I’m not sure if he’s yet eclipsed the figures for the Secret Seven, the Famous Five and the rest of her vast backlist.
Framed Photos of Enid Blyton in the Red Lion, Knotty Green
Fortunately, perhaps, at least for adult drinkers, the pub hasn’t themed itself around Noddy, Big Ears and friends. When I last visited a few years ago, it was more a collection of soft toys, books and a few photos framed on the wall. But it’s an example of how pubs can mark unexpected associations with their local communities.
The Brooke Bar, Prince and Lily
On a more seriously literary note, the Pink and Lily pub on the scarp of the Chilterns near Princes Risborough, has a wonderfully atmospheric room devoted to war poet Rupert Brooke which is preserved almost exactly as Brooke would have drunk in it himself almost exactly a hundred years ago. Brooke does have a personal connection with the Pink and Lily, having written a poem about it and spending a lot of time in the area whereas I’m not sure if Diana ever drank in England’s Rose or Enid Blyton in the Red Lion.
Combine the oddity of pubs with their role as venues where the local community comes to mix and things can get very strange indeed. It’s always been an ambition of mine to visit some of the inexplicably weird traditions in some of the remoter parts of the country. The tar barrels of Ottery St. Mary are near the top of my list, although not strictly pub related, but I’m most curious to visit the completely bonkers Straw Bear Festival of Whittlesea — which seems to be the most surreal pub crawl imaginable.
But very peculiar entertainment is laid on in pubs closer to home. Below is a YouTube video I took at the Swan in Great Kimble during its recent beer festival (or Oktoberfest — which explains Mick, the landlord’s rather incongruous Lederhosen). No expense was spared in the provision of scintillating entertainment for the patrons — there was a nail driving competition.
For anyone unfamiliar with the idea (as I was) it is a stunningly straightforward contest. Two people with two hammers and two nails — and the fastest to knock their nail into the stump wins. Who needs 3D films, karaoke or even television when we can entertain ourselves like this?
But, in this clip, entertaining it definitely was. The two contestants are my friends Carl (on the left) and Simon. There are two separate contests but Simon is trounced in each one. The scepticism and bewilderment that Simon displays through movement and body language in checking Carl’s nail has indeed been driven in faster is pure physical comedy.
It’s a priceless little nugget that shows how British eccentricity still thrives if you know where to look for it.
It’s four weeks since the end of my intense period of editing that finished with me frantically e-mailing my novel manuscript to the printers and bookbinders and heading up the Holloway Road to have the satisfaction of picking up my own copies.
The printers sent two bound copies directly to Manchester Metropolitan University — who kept me in suspense a while before acknowledging receipt. I felt relieved when I eventually received a confirmation e-mail, although I now need to wait until late June to hear whether I’ve made the grade.
Many people I’ve spoken to about the course have been quite incredulous about this nine month delay in communicating students’ marks. It’s apparently because the awards committee only sits once a year (in the summer) and, as we part-time students are given until the start of the next academic year to write our novels, we have to wait for our marks to be confirmed when all the conventionally scheduled English and Creative Writing courses are assessed at the end of 2013-4.
(Since submitting the novel I’ve now heard that MMU have changed their schedule so they intend to give us our marks and feedback by mid-January next year — at which point we should know whether we’re going to graduate but will still have to wait until the summer for it to be official.)
While it would be nice to be able to put the letters MA after my name (should I pass) it’s been the process of taking the course that’s been of much more value to me than gaining the qualification.
After all, agents and publishers don’t look at the Creative Writing MA on a graduate’s CV and immediately decide to your manuscript will do the business for them.
But the process of taking the course and sticking with it to the end ought to show evidence of many desirable qualities in a writer. At York Festival of Writing, one agent in particular told me how much she likes Creative Writing MA students and graduates. Other agents have also said that a mention of an MA in a covering letter means that will give a submission more serious consideration on the grounds that the writer has invested time and money in improving their own writing.
Completing an MA course should demonstrate:
The standard of your writing as a whole has met (and maintained) the quality criteria of the course admissions tutor — for the MA I needed to have my own creative writing assessed as well as a piece of criticism
The potential to take a professional attitude towards your writing — motivation and enthusiasm are some of the qualities that are examined in the interview process. Also, students on an MA course have to be able to take and receive criticism and feedback from both students and tutors
An ability to deliver work to deadlines — not only the final novel but several other pieces of academic work must be submitted on time. There are also many other dates that that have to be met — when it’s your turn to distribute a 3,000 word extract for discussion — or to send another writer feedback on their work. The MMU course was structured so that, at times, each student was expected to provide a new section every second or third week — it could be an intense schedule.
Three Years’ Worth of Effort
You can write a novel! At the end of the course, at least for MMU, you should have a work that’s potentially publishable that can be before an agent — if you don’t you’ll fail.
Unlike the MMU course, not all MA courses insist on a novel length piece of work be submitted as a final assessment. Given that the MMU 60,000 minimum word count is about four times the length of a typical academic Masters level dissertation then some courses might not consider this length of assessment necessary (in terms of course credits the novel forms 60 out of 180 points overall — only 20 more than the much shorter Transmission project).
But it’s been the experience of writing a novel-length piece that’s been the most valuable aspect of the course for me and it’s by completing the draft, going back and revising and altering and grappling with the many tentacled octopus that has taught me lessons that can’t be taught as theory.
I’ll be much better prepared to write the next novel purely by pushing myself through the experience of completing The Angel and, in that regard, MMU’s decision to devote the third year of the course to independent writing with one-to-one support from a tutor might ultimately teach students as much as in the more formally taught sections of the course.
I found an interesting blog post by Andrew Wille, who was a ‘book doctor’ at the York Festival of Writing: Learning And Studying And Writing: A DIY MA In Creative Writing . It’s worth reading the post for his list of recommended writing books, including several I’ve read such as the excellent Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, Harry Bingham’s pragmatic How to Write, the amusing How Not To Write A Noveland the ubiquitous Stephen King book.
Andrew Wille has substantial experience of teaching and studying writing and argues that any novel submitted for a Creative Writing MA will need substantial revision before it’s commercially publishable (and often more than one redrafting).
Having gone through the MA experience I don’t disagree — read the comments after his blog post and you’ll see a conversation between us on the subject.
Despite the apparently leisurely deadline, I’d guess that most of the novels submitted for MA deadlines only come together very near the end of the writing process as long, organic, rich works formed of interdependent strands. Their writers might therefore benefit from a period of reflection at the complexity of the work they’ve created.
And the writers wouldn’t likely to be taking an MA if it wasn’t the first time they’d worked so seriously on a novel to the point of its completion. So any MA novel is likely to undergo plenty of changes if it’s taken up by an agent and publisher — but at least the novel exists.
It’s probably inevitable from workshopping in 3,000 and 5,000 words discrete segments for the MA course and writing groups that the finished work when it’s put together bears a risk of repetition.
When writing sections to be presented out of context, it’s difficult not to anticipate comments and questions from readers who may have last encountered the story weeks or months ago: there’s a temptation (perhaps unconscious) to drop in a piece of exposition or dialogue that illustrates just why a certain character might behave in a particular way or to establish setting or theme.
It’s not too difficult to spot the blatant repetitions but it’s harder to identify actions or dialogue in scenes that perhaps do the same job as examples in other sections but do so in subtly different ways. It’s a tough judgement call to cull these, especially when they might be also serving another purpose in the novel. It’s another example of where workshopping in sections doesn’t recreate the experience of a ‘real world’ reader who’d hopefully have conjured up their own unique interpretation of the novel having read the novel as a continuous whole.
On the other hand, to avoid embarrassing themselves with work littered with typos, clumsy phrasing and bad grammar, I’ve noticed that most students and writing group participants will polish the extracts they present for workshopping to a standard that’s far above first draft.
I tend to write a first draft, print it, revise it on paper, make alterations in the manuscript, then read it aloud again and proof-read before I’ll send the work out for comment. That’s more like third or fourth draft — and still typos creep through. But this ought to mean — in addition to the copy editing and proof reading before the final submission — that novels produced on MA courses are probably presented in a more respectable state than the average manuscript an agent will receive, even if structural changes are required.
I hinted in the last blog post that the location of my novel/dissertation printers on the Holloway Road was a little serendipitous. It’s because the famously grimy, largely down-at-heel north London road was often my route to City University for the Certificate in Novel Writing — and it’s likely many of the ideas that formed the conception of the novel were mulled over while stuck in its traffic jams.
My journey down the Holloway Road started from a grotesquely ugly office block where I was working at the time which was stranded in the middle of a housing estate on the very margins of Luton.
Even David Brent Would Probably Find This Soulless
While I’m sure the local area was a perfectly acceptable place to live — it was one of the more desirable areas of Luton — it wasn’t exactly thrilling as a location to spend one’s working day. The only ‘entertainment’ nearby was an Asda and a small parade of local shops containing an Iceland, various takeaways and an estate pub.
Nevertheless, the Asda had quite a sizeable book section and I used to think (and still do) that it would be a great ambition to have a book of mine on sale there. Of course Foyles on Charing Cross Road or Waterstones on Piccadilly would be great, as would all the wonderful independent booksellers, but making it to the shelves of Asda in Luton would make a different sort of statement.
At lunchtimes I escaped by running around the pleasant country lanes that lay beyond the suburban sprawl. I sometimes did a bit of writing in the office and remember getting inspiration for a poem I wrote for an OU course from all the plastic carrier bags being blown into the branches of trees in the scrubby wasteland behind the office — it was that kind of place.
As Far From Shoreditch As You’re Likely To Get
It was the safe, uniform suburban location that, for different reasons, would drive both the leading characters in the novel absolutely crazy — and in retrospect the city versus country conflict and the themes of escape and ambition in the novel may well be rooted in the journey from Luton to Islington.
When I was working in the office, I’d leave on Mondays and Wednesdays around five, drive past the airport, barrel down the M1, then take the A1 through Henlys Corner and under the bridge at Archway, from where I had a glimpse of one of those marvellous, tantalising views where London suddenly reveals itself — the Gherkin, Tower 42, Barbican and other City towers (the Shard was yet to be built) rising in the distance.
Then it was a crawl along the Holloway Road, dodging buses and stopping at traffic lights every hundred yards, but I got to know the road well — the tube station, the bizarre architecture of the London Metropolitan University’s new extension, the art deco Odeon and the Wetherspoon conversion of the Coronet cinema.
Holloway Road shares similar characteristics to other areas adjoining large football grounds — a lot of rather folorn looking takeaways and pubs that do most of their business on match-days.
Once I drove obliviously down the road just before an Arsenal Champions’ League game. Even taking my usual shortcut down Liverpool Road to avoid Highbury and Islington roundabout and Upper Street, I was caught between coaches and police vans and ended up a stressed three-quarters of an hour late for the City tutorial.
So the Holloway Road represented the twice-weekly transition I made from the Home Counties to the centre of London — the scruffy but vital artery that connected the inner-city cool of Islington and slightly edgy Finsbury, where City University’s campus is located in the middle of one of the closest pockets of social housing to the centre of London.
Many other routes in and out of London are fast dual-carriageways or even rise on viaducts above the zone two fringes, like the A40 Westway that I normally used to drive home. Unlike these, the traveller on the A1 Holloway Road experiences the grinding pace of city life. While nowhere near as hip, it’s not too unlike the Great Eastern Street/Commercial Street area that features in the novel.
The Holloway Road
The place also has associations with the City course as one of the students set part of her novel in the area. She wrote beautifully and she described very evocatively the experience of living just off the Holloway Road, albeit a few years ago when it perhaps held its connections with the lost London of the mid-20th century a little more strongly (there was a famous eccentric department store whose name escapes me). But the writing confirmed a sense of latent oddball seediness — an area in a liminal zone between gentrified Islington and Highgate and the grittier localities, generally to the east.
The road does seem to have something of a middle-class foothold amongst the seediness — with even a Waitrose in its smartest sections. However, the Highbury and Islington end is still more kebab house than cup cake.
Collis, Bird and Withey in the Shadow of the Emirates
So it was oddly appropriate that over three years later when the novel was finished (in its MA submission form) that it would be printed right next to the road I’d regularly driven down when I first started writing it. Collis, Bird and Withey, whose service overnight service I’d recommend, are just in the shadow of the Emirates Stadium (and I’ve made James an Arsenal fan in the novel).
And as a further little co-incidence bonus, I walked past this cafe below on the way back to the tube station with my bound manuscripts in hand. Anyone who’s read the start of the novel will spot the reason.
