‘It Was So Fun’

Just been watching the second half of Eurovision while trying to start writing Chapter Five. I’ve convinced myself that it’s good research for the novel as it shows the pervasiveness of English across Europe — or actually the Eurovision area which stretches as far as Israel and Azerbaijan.

At least three-quarters of the countries sang in English and, so far, every single country has given their votes in English (we’ve not got to France yet). It shows the way that a younger generation of Europeans, possibly those who started secondary education after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have almost appropriated a version of English as their lingua franca.

I’ve been in a reasonably good position to follow this as I’ve worked for the last eight or so years in a job that has involved frequently meeting colleagues from all over Europe — and travelling pretty extensively. While bearing in mind my own, and that of the British overall, pretty dreadful mastery of language skills (only exceeded by the Americans), I’ve found that English speaking ability is a bit unpredictable in people over around 40 — some very educated people can struggle. However, younger people, at least those I’ve met in a work context, are almost exclusively excellent at spoken English. There’s no hestiation or nervousness — just fluency, albeit often marred to British ears by an American accent.

One reason for this is that many Europeans spend a time living in this country to help their English skills. I’ve been doing a writing course at City Lit in Covent Garden for the last few weeks and fellow course members include a German, an Italian,  a Dane and a Japanese. The Europeans are so fluent at English that if you were to transcribe the words coming out of their mouths there would be very little difference to a ‘native’ English speaker — perhaps they would be slightly more formally accurate. While the Japanese student has quite a strong accent, she took one of the Londoners to task about her grammar — saying she was trying to learn English and couldn’t understand how the sentences had been constructed.

All this is, of course, is my self-justification for writing much of Kim’s dialogue in fluent English — but I think that’s the most accurate thing to do. I don’t think she’ll feel or behave like a foreigner at all when she’s in London — as London really is such a cosmopolitan city. (Bren Gosling’s novel about an immigrant in London is another example.) Yet, when Kim leaves, she’ll just about cross that almost tangible border between the influence of London and that of rural England. I tend to think of it in terms of motorway junctions — J5 on the M40, J12 of the M4 — but the motorways extend London’s influence out along their corridors. I see The Angel pub being the other side of London to Amersham and Wycombe — and so really in another world culturally. Kim will feel like she’s in another country then, to begin with.

But she’d be celebrating tonight with Germany having won Eurovision in the end. As the (over 30) Executive Supervisor of Eurovision said of the big flash-mob dance — ‘it was so fun’.


Penthouse and Pavement

We ran on past our finishing time last night in our workshop — so late that the university building was locked up before Guy and I had our tutorials with Alison. These then took place on an amenable table outside the Queen Boadicea pub on St. John Street (quite apt for my novel). More of the consequences of the tutorial in a later post. This meant I missed a meeting I was hoping to pop into in High Wycombe (also in a pub) and got home quite late. However, I stayed up to watch a fascinating documentary on Heaven 17’s 1981 album ‘Penthouse and Pavement’.

This came out around the time I did my ‘O’ levels and, while I loved the Human League and Soft Cell and others, I wasn’t quite old and trendy enough to have bought ‘Penthouse and Pavement’, although I think I knew of its existence. When I went to university I got to know the album pretty well. I even think I played tracks off it, like ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’ when I did the Friday night disco a couple of times at the student union. (It’s hard to believe, I know, but I did a bit of DJ-ing when I was 18 and then did a weekly show with my friend Hog Head on the student campus radio station when I was at UC Santa Barbara.)

Watching the documentary made me realise how much of a subconscious influence it must have been on me as many elements seems to have already turned up in my novel so far. It was said on the programme that ‘Penthouse and Pavement’ was actually a concept album for the 80s — obviously contrasting the disparity of wealth in the Thatcherite early 80s of the penthouse dwellers with those living on the pavement: the vinyl LP had a ‘Penthouse’ side and a ‘Pavement’ side. The brilliant cover, ‘like a cheesy company annual report’  as I think someone commented, was an ironic, arty comment on capitalism with the suited, pony-tailed band members striking yuppie poses — handshaking, on the phone doing a deal — which anticipated the Loadsamoney culture by five or six years.

The part of ‘The Angel’ that I’ve written so far has remarkable similarities — James starts high up in a gleaming office block, coming down to street level to meet grimy, struggling Kim. A stretch of pavement also plays a big part in one chapter. Thematically the characters represent the tension between penthouse (James) and pavement (Kim). The vocals on the title track, my favourite, are also an interplay between Glenn Gregory’s world-weary, deep male tones and sparky, soulful female vocals on the chorus (someone called Josie James, who’s not the woman on the video). That’s similar to the exchange of points-of-view I have so far in the novel. I’d also like to achieve a similar effect (for the City part of the novel anyway) with the prose as Heaven 17 achieve with the music — quite fast, sparse, sly, unpredictable — but not taking itself too seriously.

I guess I could elaborate further and speculate that the first track off Heaven 17’s next album, ‘The Luxury Gap’, becomes the next theme of the novel — ‘Temptation’. This track has been released in several different edits — and often turns up on compilations. My favourite is when Carol Kenyon’s ooh-oohing is allowed to run its full length (just before ‘step by step, day by day’). This is another track with a male-female dynamic and is relevant to the next part of The Angel — particularly the lines taken from the Lord’s Prayer ‘Lead us not into temptation’. In fact the next two singles off The Luxury Gap also fit my story — ‘Come Live With Me’ and ‘Crushed By The Wheels of Industry’ — this is now starting to get worrying.

I looked up the video of Penthouse and Pavement on Youtube after the programme, which I vaguely remembered — and in another stroke of perhaps unconscious serendipity the actress who plays the spying secretary is almost the spitting image that I hold my mind of Kim — once she’s got herself healthy in the countryside — she’s even got green(ish) eyes. (The actress is called Emma Relph — who was in the 1981 Day of the Triffids and is now apparently an astrologer.) The video is embedded below — take a look at the typewriter and photocopier — yet other artefacts don’t seem to have changed too much in 29 years.

Three Universities in Two Days

I seem to be visiting a lot of universities recently. On Monday I went up to the Open University, where I met my MSc. supervisor and my ‘specialist advisor’ — both are a married couple of academics who work on the same area of research. My supervisor is Italian but has obviously lived here a long time so listening to her speech, which I tend to do on a weekly basis, is quite good practice for writing Kim’s dialogue. Strangely I was one of the few students (perhaps the only one) on the Milton Keynes campus because, despite having perhaps millions of students, none of them actually attend the OU itself on a regular basis — it’s all done at a distance (or in summer schools and the like).

Then it was straight down the M1 and A1 to City University on Monday.

Last night I went to the Wheatley campus of Oxford Brookes University. This was to go to an Association of MBAs networking event on creating a cv. Most of the other people there were students on the Brookes Business School MBA, most of them full time. It was quite interesting to chat to some of them afterwards about why they were doing the course — quite a few had enrolled due to redundancy and were looking to do something completely different (a little like James).

While I was there principally for non-writing purposes, it was also good background as the speaker, Corinne Mills, is a careers specialist. According to her consultancy’s website she’s been the careers expert on Chris Evans’ Radio Two show, Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five, on the Six O’ Clock News and in all sorts of print media. Unsurprisingly, she has an human resources background so I got myself re-familiarised with HR speak. I talked afterwards with someone who was MD of a leadership development consultancy (employing 18 people) whose business is to work with these terribly (self) important executives with massive egos — the world from which James has just been removed.

As it turns out, my existing cv seems to tick all the boxes already — probably linked to my ‘excellent written communication skills’ (as it no doubt claims dispensing with any modesty — as it must). Apparently 80% of cvs have spelling mistakes and 13% are seriously flawed in written content or presentation. There were a few classic, true-life errors quoted that passed the spell checker level of proof reading. One could apply to James though I might have to invent something original along the same lines if I wanted to use it in the novel: ‘My hobbies include cooking dogs and interesting people’.

The Eve of St. Agnes

I bought a copy of the latest Magma poetry magazine when I was in London last week. Its cover article was ‘Favourite Erotic Poetry’. I was interested to see how I poem I took along to the March meeting of Metroland poets was selected by a couple of the poets making their selection, including Blake Morrison. It was ‘They Flee From Me’ by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a 16th century poet who allegedly had an affair with Ann Boleyn.

One of the choices of the other poets was Keats’ ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. The erotic element of this poem comes with the legend of the Eve of St.Agnes — a time when apparently young virgins would dream of the man who was going to sweep them off their feet in later life if they lay naked on their beds on that night (or some other tradition approximating to this). Keats is one of the most sensuous poets — I remember having ‘purple stained mouth’ from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ being explained to me when I was doing him for A-level.

It was quite a revelation to come back to the poem after years — for some reason its phrase ‘a dwarfish Hildebrand’ has popped into mind quite regularly in the intervening time although I didn’t realise where it came from. In the poem Keats uses a couple of star-crossed lovers  — Madeleine and Porphyro. Madeleine is some sort of aristocratic girl, whose chambers are guarded by old nurses. The eroticism happens when Porphyro manages to wheedle his way past Madeleine’s protectors and hides unseen in her room while she strips off and prepares herself for the St.Agnes ritual.

Perhaps it was latent all along but I’d been toying with the idea of something similar at the start of The Angel. The idea is that Kim and James end up together in a similar sort of situation (except facilitated by the after effects of a drunken night out). I think I’ve worked out plot devices for both to be in the same situation. I won’t add more, partly because I need to think it through a bit further, and partly to keep a bit of suspense.

On a related subject, one of my coursemates — whose blog (Bren Gosling’s ‘Evolution of My Novel’ is referenced from the sidebar — wondered whether I was giving out too much of the plot of the novel on this blog. If anyone has any comment on that I’d be interested to hear it. I don’t think I give out enough information for my ideas to be copied and ripped off but it might be possible that anyone be following instalments of the novel (or even just waiting to read it when it’s finished in its entirety) might find some plot spoilers in here. (I’ve probably given the biggest plot spoiler to people on the course already with my short fire scene from last term.)

Here are a couple of stanzas of Keats’ ‘Eve of St.Agnes’ that allude to what might happen later in The Angel:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven: – Porphyro grew faint:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,

Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,

In fancy, fair St Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Metroland

In another interesting, perhaps subliminal, connection with the underground, I’m a recently joined member of a group called Metroland Poets. As might be inferred, this is a group of poets from Metroland: the area made famous (or perhaps notorious) as being opened up to development by the Metropolitan line in the early 20th century, when it stretched way past Aylesbury up to Brill (the village that Tolkien used as the inspiration for Bree in ‘The Lord of the Rings’). The poets come from a bit wider afield — mainly Bucks and adjoining bits of Berks, Herts and north-west London.

Metroland is associated with John Betjeman and there are many famous advertisements were displayed on the underground to try and encourage people to relocate to the expanding suburbs and commute into London. Vast swathes of north-west London were developed into oceans of semis between the wars although a little further out of London the commuters had higher aspirations. Places like Chorleywood, which were described by Betjeman as the “essential metroland” and the “gateway” to the Chilterns, are typified by detatched, mock-Tudor mansions.

I was thinking of writing a transition chapter between inner city and countryside and the Metroland associations help, especially with confirming the geography that I want to use. The novel is absolutely not about the suburbs or suburbia but they can’t be totally ignored. James will have commuted through the suburbs for several years but Kim will be quite unfamiliar with them.

I want to write a bridging chapter where she sets off from Marylebone, in itself a small outpost of country values in central London (ironically Chiltern Railways have been owned by Deutsche Bahn for a few years). She won’t know what kind of a place she’s going to visit and she’ll look out of the window at the inner-Metroland of dense development around Harrow, which she’ll sort of understand. Then when the train gets out towards the more affluent suburbs like Moor Park and Rickmansworth she’ll start to become horrified and not a little intimidated by the huge gardens with ornamental pools and rockeries the size of small mountain ranges — real Jerry and Margo Leadbetter territory. As she gets towards Amersham she’ll be grabbing the odd bit of relief when suburbia eventually gives way to genuine fields but she’ll still be quite let down that it’s all one commuter dormitory after the other even 35 minutes or so out of London.

But then, once the underground signalling cables eventually stop after Amersham (where the Metroland poets meet), she’ll have a moment of epiphany: she’ll see a view somewhere around Great Missenden that will take her breath away and from then on she’ll realise she’s left suburbia and the metropolitan consciousness behind. After the exit from London was so long and drawn out she’ll be astounded that such beautiful countryside can be found relatively close to the capital. (This is what the government has just announced it wants to plough its HS2 High Speed Rail line though.)

She’ll be met off the train by James (and perhaps Emma) at the nearest station to The Angel: Wendover. Ironically, this was described (according to Wikipedia) as the “pearl of Metroland”. So a nice piece of circularity seeing she starts off in a tube carriage. (I’ve also already written a scene for ‘Burying Bad News’ that’s located at Wendover station where Frances is pursued by journalists when she goes to get a train.)

Themes and Influences

Going back to Emily’s point about how themes emerge the more that one writes, I’ve realised I’ve unwittingly used some fascinating influences. I’ve just been writing, very slowly, a scene where Kim paints in her tube carriage studio and decides whether she likes James or not. Watching artists at work is not something I’ve properly researched yet but I found myself writing about gestures like her putting a brush to her mouth and nodding her head from side-to-side. I’ve realised where my mind dredged this up from — a rather famous Cadbury’s advert from the 1970s which can now be seen again on You Tube.

I’ve also given Kim a liking of religious choral music, partly because I have some of it on the computer and it’s randomly played as I’ve been writing. I did, however, buy the Classic FM CD ‘Music for the Soul’ last week which has Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ (apparently the third best loved piece of classical music in the country). I’ve seen this performed twice now — once at the Proms for the fiftieth anniversary of RVW’s death (in 2008) — and this really is music for the soul. Heard live, the bass strings resonate through your body. What’s special about the CD is that before the Fantasia is the original theme by Tallis which RVW used as the basis for his work — called ‘Why Fum’th In Fight?‘. It’s quite extraordinary to hear the theme sung and then elaborated by the string orchestra.

I may have Kim be inspired by the Tallis Fantasia later in the novel. I wanted to write it in the current scene but it’s getting quite long and I need to get the characters moving. Instead she plays John Tavener’s ‘Song for Athene’ (the 20th century Tavener, not Tallis’s contemporary). Of course this is most famous from being the music to which the Princess of Wales’ coffin was carried out of Westminster Abbey and was accompanied by the most striking images of the black and white tiling on the abbey floor. There’s also another connection between Tavener, Tallis, Vaughan Williams and Westminster Abbey. The part of Westminster Abbey where the choir sang ‘Song for Athene’  is where Thomas Tallis is buried and Vaughan Williams’ ashes are interred, which I’d not known until I did a bit of research.

I realised that I’m spontaneously generating quite a lot of references to cathedrals and other religious themes. St Paul’s is going to play a part in the story and so will the village church and churchyard (think about Emma). But it’s probably no co-incidence that this is happening with a novel that’s called The Angel — whether the title is a symptom or a cause of this is an interesting question but it all seems to tie in quite uncannily.

I also read on the Guardian’s Book Blog that angels as a general literary theme are meant to be the Next Big Thing, replacing the current vogue for vampires. I’m not sure this is a great thing for my title, seeing as my angels are on pub signs and are symbolic — not the scary sort made notorious by the likes of the famous Stephen Moffat Doctor Who episode — ‘Blink’. I do like the title, though. I’ve even worked it into the dialogue — from recently written chapter two:

He shrugged.

‘Yes, sorry about your job too,’ Kim said.

‘I’ve got the cash for you, though.’

‘You’re an angel,’ she said. ‘Come up and take a look around.’

Masterchef

It’s Masterchef final day and I watched it after Manchester United’s referee-induced ten man capitulation to Bayern Munich — which might bring a smile to Kim’s face but not mine (btw she supports Chelsea).

I watch the programme occasionally with a morbid fascination — partly due to the stilted formulaic presentation where Greg Wallace and John Torode always have to shout at each other about one finalist. The other reason is to why these mad people actually want to be chefs. One of the finalists is a paediatrician who, no doubt, earns a six figure salary from working about three and a half hours per week, twenty weeks a year for the NHS while running a private practice at £1,000 an hour. However, it’s good that there are crazy people like for whom food is a passion as that’s what James is going to have a go doing at The Angel so they’ll make his decision — to invest his redundancy in a pub — quite credible. (In fact, he’ll tell Kim that he’s been a failed contestant on a programme like Masterchef — and he won’t be lying.)

Yet all these people maintain they have a passion for doing a job that is inherently financially unstable, involves very anti-social hours and requires high levels of skill for little guaranteed financial reward. I’ve always thought these people must be barking mad.

Compare them with those who would-be novelists — the people who expend huge amounts of effort sitting in front of a computer screen on their own, investing time, most of which involves anti-social working, in something that may never be seen by more than a handful of people — even if it defies the odds and is published.

Makes you wonder who’s really the most crazy doesn’t it?

Kim

In The Angel my main female character is called Kim. She was called that before I decided to make her a German and I’ve not changed the name yet and I’m not inclined to at the moment. It’s quite an androdgynous name in also being used for men but probably the most notable current uses are American actresses like Kim Cattrall and Kim Basinger — such is the influence of American culture that Kim could probably be a genuine name in Germany (though I’ve not come across many although Wikipedia says Kim Basinger has German and Swedish ancestry). It also has an oriental manifestation as both a first name and surname — think of North Korea.

The name is often shortened from Kimberley, which has a South African association with the town or city of that name, which apparently was named after one of the Lord Kimberleys the derivation of whose name will be discussed below. (Incidentally, the Guardian’s obituary of the fourth Earl of Kimberleyshows him to have been a rather colourful character: ‘Johnny Wodehouse, the maverick, six-times-married fourth Earl of Kimberley, who has died aged 78, was as arrogant in his politics as he was in wasting his considerable inherited fortune on gambling, womanising and alcoholism.’ The current Earl is, by contrast, a computer programmer.  I’m not sure what it is but there’s something about that I like. )

Interestingly, my Kim has a history stretching back about eighteen months. She was in a short story which was reworked into a screenplay for the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course and she cost me marks as previously recounted by making ‘Twat’ her opening line. When I was thinking of The Angel she popped up again as a partly developed urban, ‘edgy’ character.  I still wasn’t sure why I’d called her Kim, though I had come across a female one of the South African variety in an office situation – who I’d heard a few stories about but never properly met (oddly enough I just saw her in the work gym today).

So I’ve been wondering why I’ve persisted with an androgynous, non-Germanic Christian name for a character who has little in common with stars of Hollywood slightly erotic film and TV (unlike Emma who’d clearly love that sort of thing). I realised that it’s blindingly obvious and goes back to the etymogical origins of the name as in Lord Kimberley. It comes from ancient English and means royal fortress and Kimberley (or Kimblerly) means field of the royal fortress — and they are both derived from the place name Kimble in Buckinghamshire, which itself was named after one of the most ancient English kings, Cymbeline, of the Shakespeare play and the remains of whose castle are still in evidence in a field in Little Kimble. (In a further twist to the power theme I think I’m right in saying that the land on which Cymbeline’s castle stands is actually part of the nearby Chequers estate.) I have to say I find something quite transcendent about the immediate vicinity of the castle — often the weather seems to change as you pass. Here’s an interesting ‘fact’ about the castle from a website on the Ridgeway, which passes close, as do both route of the 7,000 year Icknield Way — the most ancient road in Europe — ‘Legend has it that if you run  seven times round  Cymbeline’s Castle on the Chequers  Estate, the devil will appear’.

Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance
Cymbeline's Castle from a Distance

And The Angel pub is located in a fictional place that’s not too far away at all from Kimble. In fact The Swan at Great Kimble is one of the pubs which will lend attributes to The Angel. So Kim sticks for me because the name is so intrinsic to the location of the novel. I’d never twigged that before but it seems so obvious in retrospect. Of course, Kim is going to explore the area all around here and draw spiritual and psychic energy for her art. I’ll avoid her running round the castle a full seven times though or my careful plotting will go awry.

I’m working on making it plausibly German — perhaps an Anglicised contraction of her real German names or a conscious multi-culturally inspired identity?

Beacon Hill as Tor
Beacon Hill Doing A Good Impression of Glastonbury Tor

Looking for Inspiration

I wrote quite a bit in a short time up until the last Saturday workshop — around 7,000 words of the beginning of ‘The Angel — two sizeable chapters or perhaps three or four shorter ones. I tend to like shorter chapters myself when I’m reading a book — it leads to a feeling of having achieved more as a reader. However, the style I’ve written in tends to change point of view between James and Kim (in fact for the first chapter more than POV — the whole scene changes as they are apart). That might make for chapters that are too bitty or too obviously in parallel. No need to worry so much about that at the moment, though.

I also wrote about 4,000 words for Swan Supping — mainly a walk and the Beer Diet attached to a previous post — and submitted a 3,500 word assignment for my MSc. (However, there is a serial called ‘The Gravediggers’ Arms’ in Swan Supping, now in its fourth part, by a Charlie Mackle that concerns someone called James taking over a pub — a bit of a protoype for ‘The Angel’.) This probably came off worst in terms of quality. I’ve had it marked and got 60%, which is ok, but based on initial comments from my supervisor I’d hoped to bullshit a bit more effectively but she’d found me out in places and I realise I’ll need to put more time into the next one, which actually counts towards the course marks. Even so, I suppose I’ve taken the first steps to doing it, which is probably the biggest obstacle in these sort of things.

Given that about 3,000 words of The Angel’s extracts were written a week or two before then that’s about 11,000 words done in the space of just over a week. Since then I’ve found it quite difficult to get myself going again. I note from Bren Gosling’s latest blog post (that I note enviously was written from Sicily) that he’s also finding it difficult to start up again after the culmination of last term. In an effort to re-invigorate myself I’ve gone back and looked over the comments that coursemates made on the scripts of the extracts I read for my third reading, back at the end of February. That was two scenes — one of James and Emma looking over a spreadsheet about finances and one the fire scene with James and Kim. The comments were, without exception, really supportive and generous. Some queried a few practical things (volume of fire alarm, is dopamine a hormone? and so on) and made some constructive suggestions. A few comments recurred among several readers — ‘dialogue is always one of your strengths’, ‘the characters’ voices seem real’, ‘believe in the finance speak’, ‘fast-moving’, ‘a page turner’, ‘want to find out what happens next’, ‘deft and sly humour’ and there was also one comment that praised the prose, which I particularly liked as the writing wasn’t particularly showy in those sections. Most comments said this was the best section yet and how it was hitting its stride — which makes it all quite infuriating to find it quite difficult to make myself sit there and grind out more of it unless I have some deadline looming.

I’ve rewritten the ends of the two threads from James and Kim’s POV inside the tub carriage where he turns up on the morning he’s been fired to pay £500 for a painting that she tried to sell for £1,000 the night before at a viewing. This was the end of the chapter I submitted to Alison as my supposed 4,000 novel opening (it’s more likely to be the end of chapter one and start of chapter two). The rewritten part is just practical scene-setting for the 1,000 or so words I’ve managed since then. These, in themselves, tend to set up the rest of the day, which will be the long-anticipated bender (subject to much procrastination in writing terms). He’ll find out she’s in serious debt and she’ll reveal she makes ends meet by working some shifts in a pub (hardly on international art collector circuit money). I’ll also try to describe how Kim looks. It’s important that she’s not too good-looking but she has to have the capability of developing into someone he does find very attractive in the end (Jane Eyre similarities again). She’s also got to look fairly good from a distance in a soft-focus sort of way (I have some plot ideas about this) so he’ll get close up to her and find a few off-putting things like imperfect complexion, unhealthy pallor, bony face exaggerated by piercings and so on — all stuff that can gradually melt away.  

The bender scene will also pack in quite a lot of character exposition. I’m hoping I can get away with this by moving fast from location to location but I do have concerns that I’ll have perhaps an opening 15,000 words or so that almost entirely concentrates on the two principal characters over a period of about 30 hours in London. I raised this at my tutorial with Alison a week last Saturday and she seemed to think it was ok. I’ll end up following this introduction with an extended time period during which the two characters team up and build up their business, which will be quite a contrast. However, there will be quite a nice symmetry in that I plan the ending to be in London with a similar fast pace, though I may have to insert extra plot elements to bring it up to anything like 15,000 words.

Speaking of Alison’s tutorial, I specifically asked in advance about some concerns that I had and she replied in pencil on a printout of the e-mail in amusingly laconic fashion. ‘Is the scene with James fast-moving enough? ‘ [YES] ‘Are the ones with Kim on her own too slow?’ [OK — WITH EDITING — NB. I’m personally still a little concerned about these being static especially when I continue the action later in Village Underground.] ‘I’ve intercut the two threads in this extract and wonder whether this is a valid approach.’ [YES] ‘I’m also interested in what you make of the location for Kim — it’s a bit unusual but is it clear?’ [YES — GREAT]. And the real paranoid ‘is it any good question: ‘Overall, would this set up a story that readers would be interested in?’ [YES]. So I take all that as not a bad endorsement and really a call for myself to bloody get on with it.

The Grey Goose

We had a session with Emily about how themes and connections will start to emerge in our work. I realised that I had an interesting location with Village Underground and that there was something subconscious in why I liked it so much. During the class I realised that the trains were a metaphor for the whole city-rural tension in the novel — something that connects the two halves together and they were also an inversion of the natural order — underground trains being on the top of something rather than the bottom.

But other odder influences are at work in my mind. One CD I’ve been playing in the car is possibly the most untrendy album ever released by the untrendiest of the Beatles — it’s ‘London Town’ by Wings. I’ve always liked the album since I recorded it on cassette from someone over 30 years ago. It was released just after ‘Mull of Kintyre’ had become the biggest selling single ever (until Band Aid) — and this was just as punk was coming down from its heyday. There’s little classic rock/pop on the album in the mould of ‘Band on the Run’, which might have gained it fans. In fact some of the album is pretty rubbish — the Elvis style rockers for example. However, it has the fairly ground-breaking single, ‘With A Little Luck’ which is almost all synthesizers and was released a good three years before the Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and so on got started with Synth Britannia. Also, the title track ‘London Town’ that was McCartney’s first flop in years is a beautiful piece of music with Linda McCartney’s harmonies sounding beautiful, especially at the end — it’s a shame the lyrics are so ridiculous. When I’ve been walking round looking at London with an eye to finding usable locations I’ve had ‘silver rain was falling down upon the dirty ground of London Town’ going through my mind on many occasions. The main strength of the album, to me, are the four or five folk-rock tracks mainly co-written by McCartney and Denny Laine — ‘Deliver Your Children’ and ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ are cracking songs. The last track, and this is the point of this diversion into ‘London Town’, is called ‘Morse Moose and the Grey Goose’ which is something of a concept song made of a few fragments but the ‘Grey Goose’ bit is a salty sea-shanty type song — complete with West Country sounding accents: ‘the Grey Goose was a steady boat, people said she’s never float, one night when the moon was high the Grey Goose flew away’.

So I’ve had this playing in my car recently.

I was writing about Kim getting herself hammered in the putative first chapter of ‘The Angel’ and I was wondering what she might drink. I thought gin maybe but opted for vodka as it’s in less need of mixers so I wondered about a suitable brand — being the proud owner of a botle of Smirnoff Blue that I bought in 1989 on my first BA staff travel flight and have never opened since. I don’t think I’ve ever actually drunk vodka at home. So I got on the Ocado website to check out some vodka brands — and there are plenty of variants with all kinds of provenance and flavours. I had to go through about 30 before I found one that I’d seen advertised in an expensive magazine like the Economist and that cost about three times the Waitrose own brand stuff. This seemed like something that might be served in the bars of Shoreditch too — it’s apparently distilled from wheat in Cognac and was sold to Bacardi as the most expensive spirit ever at $2bn apparently. The website is very Flash.

It’s called, of course, Grey Goose.

Opening the Novel?

Unlike the majority of my fellow students on the City course I’ve not approached the writing of either of my novels-in-progress in any kind of sequence — either chronologically or in anticipation of the eventual order in the book. I’m not too concerned by this as I think my brain works in a non-linear way — my (by now fairly distant) past in computer programming means I’m quite familiar with defining the meaty, functional bits of a concept and then choreographing these together — in the same way as one might write a coherent argument or report. The exercise I did with the post-it-notes (see post below) was quite useful for taking stock of where I planned to get compared with where I am now but it’s evident that I still need an opening for ‘The Angel’ and that, while I’ve written an opening for ‘Burying Bad News’ that’s likely to be superseded by later developments.

Over the weekend I thought I had a plan. I would start off ‘The Angel’ in dramatic fashion with James being unjustly fired from his financial job — being made a scapegoat partly because he’d been slowly drifting away from being ‘one of the lads’ and engaging his interest in arts. I guess this subject could be the most autobiographical of any of my writing as I’ve now twice been on the wrong end of this experience myself — currently going through the consequences of this ‘process’ as HR people like to term it. Perhaps, because I’ve aired quite a few of my own grievances, I’ve managed to do 3,000 words of this opening.

It’s in three sections — starting in media res halfway through the meeting where James is ‘re-organised’ in clinical HR speak; then a scene which is quite useful in a number of ways where he packs up his mementos from his desk (lots of character clues through the artefacts) and befriends the Somali security guard; finally a more dramatic scene in the gents where the real reasons that he’s been fired are revealed — not going to the lap dancing club being one — and he hits his erstwhile boss.

It was a real slog to write all this and took me a whole day to revise it (I think I was still feeling the effects of my cold/flu). However, 3,000 words is quite a lot, especially when this section doesn’t impinge much on the rest of the plot. To break it up a bit and avoid the impression it’s a book wholly about City types, I’m planning to interleave James’ section with Kim’s own crisis which I think  I’ll have happening in parallel.

I have a nice vision of her having an almighty row and bust up with the St. John Rivers-type character I’m yet to define — I see her standing on the top of Village Underground in Shoreditch throwing his stuff down to the street from 40 feet above Great Eastern Street. The trouble is I’m finding it difficult  to think of what she could throw without her getting arrested. I’ve wondered about her pouring paint on him. Maybe she could do it on the other side of Village Underground near the entrance to the warehouse and the spiral staircase which is currently a dead end due to the construction of the new Shoreditch High Street station? I think this would work quite well if it’s quite physical and visual as it would contrast with the corporate stuff. The two would then turn to each other in the aftermath of their stressful mornings and head out on the aforementioned bender.

If I do two scenes with Kim at about 1,500 to 2,000 words and I guess the bender is going to take about 4,000 words (I’d like to write this for my tutorial with Alison on 27th March,  although I need to get it to her earlier than that) then I’m going to have about 9,000 words of an opening to the novel, which I think might be ok if I’m looking at around 80-100,000 words overall. I’ve already written an ending of about 3,000 words which could be expanded (I wrote it bearing in mind the tutorial word limit) and it needs some context preceding it. I’d then probably have my two pivotal plot points at about the 12-15,000  and 70-75,000 word points — where the action leaves London and then returns. Seems far too neat to actually work out properly!

Speaking of Village Underground, I was quite alarmed to hear on the radio this morning about the huge fire in an ‘office and bar complex’ in Shoreditch. Fortunately, for my own selfish purposes, it’s not Village Underground that’s gone up in flames, it’s a place about half a mile away from Shoreditch High Street — but it just shows how real life can intervene in these things.

Something Borrowed…Leads to Plugging Some Gaps

The end of my last extract, which unfortunately I didn’t have time to read on Saturday, had a fire scene in The Angel. For some reason I was looking around on the internet for fire and ice imagery and came across some references to a classic novel which has a couple of fires. I decided to ‘borrow’ a bit of the action, although the original language was definitely not in keeping with the tone of what I was writing.

Here’s some selected parts of the source — no need to worry about quotation as it’s very out of copyright:

‘I hurried on my frock and a shawl: I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand…I [was] amazed to see the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, became further aware of a strong smell of burning…in an instant I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. “Wake, wake!” I cried. I shook him but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him…I rushed to his basin and ewer…both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug,  baptized the couch afresh…the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last.’

This gave me the idea to have Kim empty ice on James to try and wake him, although my fire wasn’t dramatic enough to have flames inside the room:

‘ She coughed. The air stank. The smoke detector at the end of the hallway bleeped incessantly. She ran to the top of the stairs. Catching an orange glint in corner of her eye she stopped and looked out of the window. She saw flames through the outside glass door of the function room…”James. James. Wake up. Wake up. There’s a fire.” Kim shook him hard…flames were licking at the thatched roof…Turning the bar sink taps on full, she grabbed two bar towels and plunged them into the water. She picked up a plastic bucket and filled it from the ice machine. Carrying the bucket, she rushed upstairs, pressing a wet towel to her face. In her room she found James had put on his jeans but had then fallen asleep again on the bed. The thatch was now ablaze outside the window…Kim threw the ice in his face. “Get up you stupid man. There’s a fire. I’m not leaving you here.” As he awoke, a finger of black smoke entered the bedroom.’

I guess almost every writer who’s ever read Jane Eyre will probably have consciously or unconsciously borrowed something from the novel but it was quite fun to do. No one noted on any of the scripts that they’d spotted it, although had I got to read it out then perhaps it may have been more obvious.

I think there’s a bit of a Jane Eyre archetype in the plot of the book. While James isn’t really a Mr Rochester, Kim is going to be coming from somewhere different (Germany) to London and then will meet James and fall out and reconnect with him later (perhaps?) but I think her St. John Rivers phase will come before James. Hold on! That’s given me an idea for the sort of character she can hang around with in London — a supporting character and a bit of sub-plot that I noted I was lacking with the post-its.

Village Underground

For ‘The Angel’ I wanted Kim to be a struggling (financially if not critically) artist based in inner London. I’d thought of Hackney as a location for her studio mainly because I’d met a real artist on a German course at the Goethe Institute a few years ago who himself had a studio in Hackney — somewhere he freely described as a ‘shit hole’ that artists flocked to solely because it was cheap.

When he heard the synopsis read, Michael B from the City course suggested that I might also consider Shoreditch as the kind of weird and wacky place where artists like Kim might hang out — and recommended a few places I might want to go to soak up the ambiance.

In the meantime, I’d bought a fantastic ‘London for Londoners’ type guidebook called ‘Secret London — An Unusual Guide’ by Rachel Howard and Bill Nash (Jonglez Publishing). Among the many fascinating sights that 99% of Londoners probably aren’t aware of was somewhere that seemed exactly the right setting for Kim.

Village Underground from the Street
Village Underground from the Street

It’s Village Underground which is, bizarrely, a huge open space that’s used for performances, fashion shoots and exhibitions and is topped by four old Jubilee Line tube train carriages — about 40ft above Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch. The tube trains have creatively been turned into office space and are used by local artists, actors, writers and creative people in general — at a relatively low cost.

Graffiti Art on Rooftop Tube Carriages
Graffiti Art on Rooftop Tube Carriages

The book mentioned that someone might be willing to show visitors round if they asked nicely so I called Village Underground and said I was writing a novel and I’d like to see if would be a suitable setting for my character. They were extremely friendly and accommodating and even allowed me to turn up yesterday to take a look around at short notice while the performance space was being fitted out for a fashion show (lots of designer types hanging around outside). I was allowed to take plenty of photos, some of which are interspersed in this post.

Old Jubilee Line Carriage
Old Jubilee Line Carriage

Tam took me up the spiral staircase on the outside of the building on to the roof to get a close look at the tube carriages, most of which had been grafitti’d by the graffiti artists who based themselves there. It was a miserable day in February so the roof garden wasn’t at its best but apparently it’s a very social place for the artist types to hang out in the summer. I peered into some of the carriages, which had indeed been turned into creative workshops.

As well as showing me round Tam gave me a lot of useful advice on other places in London where artists congregate in numbers. As I’d originally thought, Hackney has a real concentration — particularly Hackney Wick — somewhere else I’ll need to investigate. She told me about a few places locally in Shoreditch to have a look around and after I left I went on a very long walk around the area which took me to Brick Lane. I then set off back into the City, going through Liverpool Street and Barbican and heading back to City University for the evening’s class.

It was an odd experience to stand above Shoreditch in the  artists’ community and look at the skyscrapers encroaching northwards from the City of London. (I took a cab up Bishopsgate to Village Underground and passed the construction site of the Heron Tower, which became the tallest building in the City a couple of months ago, as well as the big hole in the ground that will become the Pinnacle tower, which at 63 floors will overtake the Heron Tower.)

The City Encroaching On Shoreditch
City Encroaching On Shoreditch

It’s staggering how the wealth of the City suddenly changes in the space of a hundred yards or so into the ‘edgy’ area of Shoreditch. Tam said the City is encroaching further into the area and the artists are being priced out — I later saw a new Crowne Plaza hotel on Shoreditch High Street.

This is all fantastic stuff for the novel as I have a good reason for James, who’s working in a financial institution, to end up pretty close to Kim in geographical terms. He could easily pop out to Shoreditch after work or even in his lunchbreak if, like me, he occasionally tends to take rather long ones.

Many thanks go to Jack and Tam at Village Underground for being so hospitable and I’m hoping to return there to enjoy the roof garden when the weather’s more clement.

Kim’s Hometown

We got given some homework yesterday — to write in one of our characters’ voices about their hometown. Strangely I didn’t leave it until a few hours before the next class to think about starting it. This probably followed on from our discussion about plot where a small group of us considered potential holes in each others’ plots — mine was getting my unlikely protagonists together, Kim and James in ‘The Angel’. I was probably also motivated by my visit to Village Underground (see forthcoming post).

Making Kim a German has let me re-use a lot of my knowledge about Germany — a country I’ve probably visited about once a month between 2001 and 2009, sometimes more frequently. Despite my shameful ability to speak the language I actually know and recognise quite a bit of German. I’ve also met hundreds of Germans and visited more or less every large city in Germany and Austria, with the exception of places like Leipzig and Dresden. So writing about Kim’s hometown was like teasing open the floodgates. I got to the 500 word limit fairly rapidly: Kim’s Hometown .

Incidentally, the Benther Berg is completely real and so is the hotel — I’ve stayed there a couple of times and there’s a photo in existence of me fallen asleep in the bar there worse for wear having consumed Herculean quantities of red wine on the company’s expense account. It can be looked up on German Wikipedia here.