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The Great Big Fabergé Egg Hunt

Faberge Easter Eggs at Covent Garden 2012

Selected Fabergé Easter Eggs at Covent Garden

Anyone who’s walked around certain areas of London — such as the South Bank, Carnaby Street or Canary Wharf — during Lent this year might have been puzzled by seeing giant eggs dotted around on plinths. I discovered them on a lunchtime stroll in St. James’s Park which, like Green Park, was home to about a dozen of these mysterious objects.

What made the eggs fascinating was that each was uniquely created by an artist, jeweller, designer or, even, architect — many of whom were household names like Bruce Oldfield, Sir Peter Blake or Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. (The architects’ designs were unsurprisingly elaborate and spectacular — see this article.)

Faberge Eggs Covent Garden
Fabergé Eggs Hanging from the Roof in Covent Garden Market

The eggs collectively formed The Fabergé Big Egg  Hunt — a brilliant initiative devised in aid of two charities — Elephant Family and Action for Children and based on the famous luxurious, jewelled eggs created by Fabergé at the turn of the 20th century.

210 of the eggs were distributed across London in 12 zones (some mentioned above) for enthusiasts to hunt down using Facebook or SMS to text donations to the charities using the egg’s number. I intended to track down them all but ran out of time before I spotted too many — although I did spot a few spectacular eggs in shop windows around Sloane Square and a few hanging from the underside of the Royal Festival Hall as well as those in the parks.

In the week before Easter all the eggs were brought to ‘nest’ at Covent Garden and hours before they were all due removed to be auctioned off I managed to make a visit. I was very glad I did.

I liked the idea of the egg hunt but seeing the eggs altogether around the piazza — some in shops, others hung from the roof, most arranged in rows on the cobbles — showed what  extraordinary breadth of innovation and imagination had been devoted to the eggs’ conception. There were eggs that were quirky, eccentric, clever, beautiful, funny, witty, sensual, extravagant and thought-provoking — and all were completely individual. So it was appropriate they’d been dotted around London — a city that also well deserves that list of adjectives.  The tourists in Covent Garden were definitely enjoying the surprise eggstravaganza (I finally succumbed to ovoid-linguistic temptation).

I took a few photos (arranged in the collage above) of some of my favourites, although I didn’t photograph the one that’s made the most lasting impression on me, which was Egg 5 Around the world before bedtime, (which is covered in wistful flying childhood dream silhouttes against a beautiful graded brown background) by Miss Dee (who’s apparently a Brighton-based wall mural artist).

As a bit of character development I was wondering which of the eggs Kim, the artist in my novel, might have created. I guess the proper answer is none — like all the artists and designers she’d create something unique — but I saw a few that would seem to appeal to her personality. The black egg with randomly flashing lights (Chicken by Jason Bruges Studio) might be appropriate for her hip Shoreditch nightlife; the elaborate decoration of Charm by Spina Designs ties in with her body jewellery (and she’d probably be interested in  passementerie too); but probably the most apt for spiky Kim would be Harriet Mead’s Ambush — a plain egg climbed by two lizards about to devour a cricket.  (Her artistic style might be reflected by Eggsquisite London, The Power of Plants and Sad Happy Frog Egg in the photos above.)

The eggs in the photos at the top (clockwise from the top left) are: 14, Ascension by Caio Locke and 3D Eye; 169, Egg Letter Box by Benjamin Shine; 130, Eggsquisite London by Paul Kenton;  179, My Generation by Vincent McEvoy;  159, The Power of Plants by Susan Entwistle; 113, Sad Happy Frog Egg by Gary Card; 55, Metropolis by Rob and Nick Carter; 196 On/Oeuf by Oliver Clegg; and the other side of Eggsquisite London.

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Anne Tyler at the Oxford Literary Festival

Along with 850 other fans, I was lucky enough to have a ticket to this morning’s Oxford Literary Festival interview with Anne Tyler at the Sheldonian Theatre.

It was an absorbing event – the first public appearance of its type, I believe, that Anne Tyler has ever done.  Before this year she hadn’t done an interview in the last forty. As she is a Pulitzer Prize winner with 19 novels published, this lived up to its billing as a unique event. There were apparently many writers amongst the audience, including, apparently, Nick Hornby, who was being quoted on Twitter as saying the interview was the best literary event he’d ever witnessed.

I didn’t take any notes down and, not having read as many of her novels as many in the audience, some of the discussions on individual novels only served to whet my interest for future reading (I was recommended to read Anne Tyler’s work by Emily on the City University course who said that I might learn a lot from her novels because of the style of my own writing). However, there was still a huge amount of detail about how this outstanding novelist practices her craft. The whole interview is apparently available in the public domain on the Sunday Times website for download but I found the points below of particular interest if I remember correctly.

For someone who’s gained a reputation as a recluse, Anne Tyler was a remarkably engaging interviewee – attentive, humorous, concise and self-deprecating in her answers, which, through being delivered free from any famous author egotism, gave a fascinating insight into the way she crafts her work.

Work was a word Anne Tyler returned to frequently. When asked about how she began a novel, she didn’t talk about waiting for any precious bolt of inspiration. In fact, starting a novel was something she didn’t enjoy, saying she much preferred to be in the middle of writing a novel – drafting and revising – because that was when she felt busy and productive.

The process of writing a novel started with sitting down for a month or so with a blank sheet of paper and looking through a store of index cards she keeps with ideas for the genesis of stories or characters, often based on real-life events. Some of her cards are over 30 years old but still may end up in the latest novel.

After a month or so she often experiences a moment of revelation when a character’s voice suddenly enters her head — and that’s the point when she guesses her subconscious has absorbed the prompts and has started to create an organic, dynamic novel. She then writes longhand drafts before entering it all into a computer. She then prints off the hard copy and rewrites it – then dictates the revised draft into a recorder and then uses a transcriber’s pedal to play the spoken draft back while she updates the draft on the computer.

She described this process as having started accidentally but she recommended the speaking aloud part of the process as being particularly important – especially for dialogue – which may explain why the dialogue in her novels is so good. (Or, more likely, an innate ear for dialogue probably demands that speaking aloud forms this vital part of the writing process.)

By the time she starts writing the drafts, she said she has the characters and the plot planned (although she claimed that she ‘doesn’t do plot’ and that time passing is often a plotting device in itself and may be the only momentum necessary in her novels of family and relationships).  She did say she starts out writing always knowing the ending of the novel ‘and about fifty per cent of the time it turns out I’m right.’

With such a meticulous approach to creating the final draft, it wasn’t surprising that Anne Tyler’s editor (who’s worked on all 19 books before retiring with the latest one) is not an interventionist type. She described her initial reaction to an editor’s change as one of ‘what the hell does she know about it?’ but then came round to usually seeing the merit in her suggestions – for example for extra exposition.

One aspect where Anne Tyler said she was most often over-ruled was titles – many of her favourite working titles have been changed by the editor or publisher. This surprised the audience because her novels’ titles are often intriguing and paradoxical – e.g. The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons.

Peter Kemp, the Sunday Times chief fiction reviewer, who was the interviewer, drew attention to her extraordinary attention to detail and said that he didn’t know of another writer who illustrated character and emotion by detailed reference to gestures and objects. She replied that she thought that was a reflection of how she saw the world herself – noticing the detail while sometimes missing out on the more general picture.

This may be a modest way of answering but this eye for the specific, allied to an ability to pick precisely the right diction, elevates her prose above the danger of providing too much detail (or ‘clutter’ as one of my creative writing tutors described this style when it may not be expertly executed).

I was reading Breathing Lessons before going to the event and I was in awe of some of the language of detail she used. Referring to the detritus in the back of a car she writes ‘The floor was cobbled with cloudy plastic lids from soft drink cups’ and that Maggie ‘carried a fistful of lids around to the rear of the house and dropped them in a crumpled garbage can. The cover was only a token cover, a battered metal beret that she replaced crookedly on top.’ The verb ‘cobbled’ is so unexpected and apt and its contrast with ‘cloudy’ is brilliant and the image of the metal beret is simultaneously obvious and extraordinary. And I’m glad that a writer of her calibre is not afraid to use an adverb like ‘crookedly’ so brazenly.

Such rich diction using adjectives and adverbs that enhance already strong verbs and nouns reminds me of Nabokov – and it was interesting to find out that Anne Tyler majored in Russian at university and cites Russian literature as a big influence.

Her precision with language may explain one answer that I thought might be controversial. Her novels are written very successfully in both first and third person and she was asked if she preferred either style. She replied that she always started off novels in the third person and that she thought ‘first person was a bit of a cheat’. I can’t remember whether she justified this comment as she then went on to talk about when it became technically necessary to convert a narrative into the first person – when a closeness to a character becomes an over-riding factor.

However, I feel I understand exactly what she means. A third person narrator is closer to being an authorial construct and, perhaps, is more accountable to the reader. A first person narrative can be viewed as a kind of extended monologue — any imperfection, unreliability or idiosyncrasy in that voice can always be explained and excused away as being part of the fiction (e.g. when analysed in creative writing workshops). It’s the question of whether an effect was intentional or not – and I have the impression that Anne Tyler is such a meticulous writer that she’d ideally like to demarcate the characters voices with dialogue and develop a more flexible, independent narrator. But, as she said, it all depends on context – first person is sometimes the only way to tell the story.

There were a huge number of questions from the audience and the event stretched on way past its billed hour duration. Many people prefaced their questions with profuse thanks to the author for having written something that had had a profound effect on their own lives – and sounded very sincere, perhaps not surprising bearing in mind Anne Tyler’s subject matter, which includes families, relationships, bereavement, ageing, etc.

One question I found particularly interesting was asked by a man (the female-male ratio in the audience and with the questions was about 4 or 5 to 1). He asked Anne Tyler how she created such plausible male characters – successfully articulating a man’s perspective on the world.  Her answer was commendably straightforward in saying that she’d been fortunate to get to know many men who’d been ‘fixed’ (I think that was the word) in her life (such as father, husband, other family members). (Her attitude to men in that answer reminded me of Graeme A. Thomson’s description of Kate Bush’s.) She added that, in her opinion, men had less freedom than women emotionally and, when writing male characters, she had to be more indirect, substituting a gesture or oblique comment for expressions of feeling.

There were a couple of encouraging comments for new novelists. One was that her first published novel had to do the rounds before it found a publisher. The other was that she said she particularly looked out for novels by new writers – believing that the standard of first novels nowadays was much higher than when she started writing – bearing out the reality that writers now appear to have less time to grow into their career (that last part is not so good, I suppose).

And maybe the surprise of the day was it turned out that Anne Tyler is a huge fan of the TV series ‘The Wire’ – the epitome of urban realism. Maybe that’s not quite as big a surprise considering it’s set in Baltimore and that the series is lauded for its taut, lean writing – both qualities shared by her novels (although there are some set elsewhere).

Apart from the great writing and emotional depth, Anne Tyler’s writing is suffused with subtle humour and parts of my own experience at the event were almost like something out of a novel. I was one of the first into the Sheldonian Theatre and sat with an eccentric woman who started off having a blazing row with the ushers about where they’d let us sit (although she made a big point of apologising to them later on) and then she mumbled comments through the event. Also, the first ‘question’ must have lasted several minutes during which we had the irony of hundreds of fans sat waiting for the first utterances from one of the greatest living novelists while all she could do was nod her head in agreement. Fortunately, as the session extended beyond its scheduled end time, there were plenty of fascinating answers once she started speaking.

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Something Else That’s Nearly There

Shard 220312
The Shard from the Millennium Bridge 22nd March 2012

The post below said that I’d been given good advice that one final push should see completion of a decent draft of the novel. Co-incidentally, that’s similar to the progress of something else that’s been featured in this blog occasionally (and pictures of which seem to get a fair number of hits).

The Shard is due to be finished by May this year. However, it’s still got a small way to go. I can see its progress most days from the office where I’ve been working (although, by definition, it can probably be seen from more offices than any other building now). The spire at the top is apparently complete but the uppermost floors aren’t yet finished.

I’ll be fascinated to see how the crane is removed. There’s a similar type of crane right next to where I usually work and I was really interested to see how that was erected. But that’s not 72 storeys up in the air.

So here’s a photo I took on a run last Thursday — there won’t be many more opportunities to photograph the building’s construction. Seeing as my novel features a lot of London, although its timescales predate the rapid rising of the Shard on the skyline, it would be a nice bit of karma (as a couple of my characters like to talk about) for both to be completed at the same time.

UPDATE: On the same day I posted this, the BBC website reported that the last pieces of the steel spire on top of the Shard had been lifted into place. They say the construction will be finished in June (does that I mean I give myself an extra month with the novel?)

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A Most Critical Two Weeks?

Anyone who read the post from a couple of weeks ago ‘Out of the Chaos — A Manuscript’ might be wondering, in the style of a minor cliffhanger, what was the verdict on the 174,000 words that I believed I’d pieced together in a somewhat desperate and incoherent dash to meet my reader’s deadline.

The verdict has now been delivered and, to my surprise, it appears I’ve been overdoing the  mental self-flagellation. I received a report on the manuscript, followed up with a face-to-face meeting, that was, overall, very encouraging.

In fact, it was my professional reader’s opinion that with about two weeks of solid work I could craft the whole novel into a shape that would be of a standard to send out to agents – which is fantastic. This ought to certainly silence my inner-critic — the one that must have been responsible for the post dwelling on the manuscript’s shortcomings.

Of course, those two weeks are full-time writing work. This doesn’t include my current day-job, nor the hours sitting on a train I use to travel to it (as I’m doing now) – or family or social life. But, then again, I suppose it’s only seven solid weekends.

Before going into a little more detail I should reveal (now she’s said fairly nice things about it) that it was Emma Sweeney, who ploughed through the huge Word file and reported her findings.

Emma taught us at the very end of the City University Certificate in Novel Writing when Emily had left a few weeks before the end of term on maternity leave.

(As an aside, the Certificate in Novel Writing has now been revised and relaunched as ‘The Novel Studio’ with its first incarnation in this form starting in the autumn — Emily, who’s now Course Director is taking applications now and I know she’s made changes partly based on feedback from alumni so promises to be a great experience. Emma Sweeney is part of the teaching team on the new course.)

Emma also works individually with writers (see link to Emma’s blog). I know a couple of course-mates from City University have used her services as a mentor since the end of the course — Bren Gosling has mentioned this in his blog (see link on sidebar) and his first novel, ‘Sweeping Up The Village’, was recently short-listed for a literary award, the Harry Bowling Prize.

Emma’s blog also mentions that she performs manuscript appraisals.  For me, an unavoidable side-effect of having workshopped the novel in and out of various courses over the past two years meant that most people I knew who might cast an eye over the coalescing manuscript (course-mates, tutors and other very helpful readers) would already have more knowledge of it than they might ever have wanted — and would remember the history of its development.

What I needed was someone to read it with a fresh eye — which Emma was able to do but also with some prior knowledge of my writing (see Onwards and Upwards).

So, after a few delays and postponements, I finally sent Emma the novel as it stood, with all its imperfections. She turned it round very quickly — in just over 6 working days — which is impressive for a manuscript of that length.

Moreover, it was clear, both from her report and from our subsequent discussion, that Emma had read the novel carefully — which isn’t always the case with creative writing classes and tutors. Of course, this reading was a professional arrangement, which has a not insignificant cost to the writer, although this isn’t surprising if one considers the time taken to attentively reading that many pages. It’s very unusual to get more than 5,000 words read at one time by a tutor, even on advertised novel-writing courses.

As mentioned, I was amazed that Emma thought the manuscript itself was in much better shape than my doom-laden forewarnings had suggested. While some of the material was  hastily cut and pasted as rough drafts were re-arranged and intercut and sections that had heretofore only existed in my head were written down in skeletal, first-draft form, the combined whole was adequate (in conjunction with the more polished bulk of the novel) to give a decent account of the plot and characters at least.

But — did Emma think it was any good? Well, yes she did — and said some very positive things which I won’t dwell on here — but she added some significant caveats about issues that have to be addressed in those two weeks of revision. Issues like:

  • Some work making a character a lot more sympathetic (any ideas gratefully received — what about bringing in a 3-legged dog or something?)
  • Aspects of the plot need revising and some sub-plots need killing or fleshing out
  • Characters’ motivations require better development in places
  • Evidence of my tendency (as blog readers will no doubt recognise) to slip into rambling, abstract, academic style prose needs ruthlessly cutting out — this is good because the word count is too high and if this can be lost without abandoning the reader then it’s good news for me
  • Various amounts of copy editing to do in the sections I haven’t buffed up for workshops, etc.

But all the above are within the realms of the fixable and the Emma said she enjoyed the few days that she spent with my characters in the novel’s world. In fact, when we met face-to-face, Emma said she was automatically discussing the characters’ options and decisions with me as if they were real people — which was a very good sign.

Emma also said she enjoyed the humour and the psychological side to the characters and plot — sometimes I’ve mulled over the characters’ dilemmas for hours myself and still not resolved them. She also found some of the sensuous writing to be one of the novel’s strengths, which is very re-assuring. Emma is the first person to have read a lot of the sex scenes. I was in too much of a hurry while editing to think about losing my nerve and coyly dilute them. (There’s a particular scene she thought must have been very hard to write but that she thought I got right. If, dear reader, you ever have a copy of the finished novel in your hand, you’ll probably be able to identify it.)

One of the most encouraging observations was that she thought the nature of the writing — a fair amount of dialogue plus the way the story is told from the perspective of the characters — doesn’t make the novel seem as long as it actually is. She thought it read like a novel about two-thirds of its actual length. This is particularly comforting as I erred on the side of caution and put in the manuscript several sections that I’m probably 80% certain to cut – I wanted a second opinion.

I realise that because someone with a respected reputation has said she lies the novel (pending fixes) that there’s no guarantee that anybody else will who might progress it to publication. There are loads of well-written, unpublished books.

However, I may have a few thematic arrows in my quiver in terms of hitting the current Zeitgeist  — a novel about quitting the City pressure cooker in exchange for a hot pub kitchen with food, art and sex thrown into the recipe along with some interesting settings might have some commercial appeal.

But, that’s all idle speculation without a polished, complete coherent draft. So now I’ve got to go and chisel out that two weeks of writing time and then, perhaps, bite the bullet.

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Venus and Jupiter Are All Right Tonight

Moon Venus Jupiter Triangle 2
Conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter 2100 25th March 2012

This isn’t a great photograph — a bit blurry and I did photoshop it a bit to bring out the contrast — but it shows the most marvellous conjunction of the moon, Venus and Jupiter that are in the night sky tonight.

Actually, it probably doesn’t matter that this isn’t a good photo as no photo can do justice to  the sight of the moon tonight — it looked unreal, like it had been stuck on the sky like one of those adhesive celestial bodies people attach to ceilings.

Fortunately there are very few lights outside where I live so the moon and planets were very bright (although I’m sure they could easily be seen in London) but the rest of the stars were also pretty impressive tonight. I’m deliberating about a chapter in the novel that contrasts the night sky in London with the view from the countryside and spectacular sights like tonight’s make me inclined to keep it in because of the awe inspiring sense of wonder one occasionally experiences through sights like that above.

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Cash for Access — My Story

This photo might be more relevant for my other novel, that’s currently languishing on the back burner waiting for The Angel to be completed and sent off to its destiny, but it’s certainly topical.

It was taken this morning after the Sport Relief mile at Prestwood. This is a village in the Chilterns, ironically quite close to the HS2 route, but also only about three miles or so from Chequers. I’ve done the Prestwood 10km race at least twice in the last few years, if not three times, and the first half of that course is painfully hilly — going up and down the rolling Chiltern slopes.

But the Sport Relief mile was confined to the sports ground from where the 10km starts and finishes and is totally flat — not a bad place for the Prime Minister to come and jog.

David Cameron After His Sport Relief Mile
David Cameron After His Sport Relief Mile

This is my photo — I did actually get that close to him and it wasn’t my doing either — he just appeared next to me after he’d been in the sports club pavilion immediately after the run. It was all incredibly informal although there seemed to be a mobile CCTV surveillance van parked to keep an eye on things (the camera attached to a mast can be seen in the background).

And Cameron did actually run the mile with a couple of minders but also his wife and children and a few friends of his that I maybe should have recognised, but didn’t. By contrast, I can’t imagine anyone being let within a Sport Relief mile of Obama in an equivalent situation in the US.

I was on the lookout for some sort of celebrity when we arrived at the sports ground as I couldn’t see why else there were TV cameras plus four photographers with huge lenses if it was only a couple of hundred locals there — and just before the race started the Camerons appeared discreetly out of a little convoy of cars.

I’ve not watched any of the TV coverage but found a few links to the race. I’m on this one - just about…on the far left partially obscured behind a blonde woman with sunglasses…and I streak past in a blur in this ITV coverage on the Daily Telegraph site.

On a more minor scale I also saw David Lidington, who’s the Minster for Europe, in St. James’s Park last week and he recognised me and said hello (I’ve met him a few times, although I know his wife better to talk to — we saw her last time we went to IKEA Milton Keynes).

While Cameron was clearly on a photo-opportunity, he didn’t try and muscle in on the event and was quite approachable — something that is true of most of the politicians in this country and that we should perhaps give them more credit for? And the cost of this privileged access to the Prime Minister — £6 to charity.

 

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Out of the Chaos — A Manuscript

I’ve been quiet on this blog for the last month or so for a a good reason, which is that I’ve been frantically trying to pull together a draft of the novel-in-progress to be professionally read by someone who knows me and my writing but has read little of this actual novel (I’ll reveal more later when she comes back and tells me what she thinks of it). However, how I got to this point — and the state of the manuscript — is a story worth relating first.

(There’s also a fairly tedious reason for the blog posts being more sporadic — the cumulative drag following the resumption of my daily grind into London to earn a crust doing the ‘day job’ — and even though I’m fairly new in this stint, my superiors seem to have twigged that the day-job, despite what it says on my CV is not actually my ‘passion’).

The most shocking discovery of the consolidation of many fragmentary files of novel was to find that I had 173,700 words — and that was after at least 20,000 words were dumped from the manuscript and with quite a few chapters either missing or in skeletal form.

I’d naively thought I could get the manuscript into reasonable shape before I started commuting again in mid January. This was way too optimistic but I eventually settled on a day I’d deliver a manuscript (early March) and then I had to push it back a week — partly because I fitted around work commitments in taking a couple of days leave to sit down and hammer out the manuscript. (That goodwill doesn’t feel as if it’s being reciprocated at the moment with a micro-managing boss who likes to suddenly appear at your shoulder and comment on what’s on my monitor — the kind of socially inept behaviour that one might hesitate to do with a trainee, let alone a supposed professional who he’s charging the customer a ridiculous daily rate for — that I don’t see much of. There’s a huge temptation to slip him in as a character in the next draft of the novel as revenge.)

But in the end, I managed to get a manuscript together of some semblance (it has a beginning, a middle and an end — of sorts). I wrote quite a lot of new material — including one piece for an MMU workshop that I stayed up until 6.45am in the morning to complete. Then I went to bed for an hour (it was a Saturday morning) and got the train into London for a 10.30am workshopping session with my ex-City friends on a piece I’d written earlier in the week.

To get the manuscript into one piece I worked for four days solid, getting up about 5.30am and working more or less steadily on it until about 10pm (quite a contrast with my enthusiasm for the day job). Even so, I know I’m still quite a way off getting anything that could be put in front of an agent. I was quite embarrassed that I’ve had to end up sending it in the state it is to my reader but at least I sent her something — perhaps this is some glimpse of what it may be to be a professional writer?

There were numerous ways in which it wasn’t wholly satisfactory:

  • Some sections were very sketchy (dialogue only) or even just brief notes
  • There were parts that are complete first drafts
  • There are, no doubt, many continuity issues involving times, plot events, minor characters (one changes nationality, people swap between driving a car and being a passenger), etc.
  • There were various duplications of exposition and no doubt many gaps too
  • Some of it is badly cut-and-pasted together so may not make complete sense.
  • There were definitely bits of content that I would have removed if I’d allowed myself longer to edit it.

While I think I’ve got lots more to do, I learned a lot from just pulling it together into one document (some of the files were so old that I had to do a bit of IT work with DOS command prompts and Excel editing to discover what was lurking in the mists of time on my hard drives — I even had to mine e-mail to get material that I’d forgotten to file away too).

One unique thing about writing a novel while on creative writing course is that the manuscript has largely been shaped by the demands of workshopping – and I’ve workshopped the pieces in a fairly random order as the novel wasn’t written sequentially. So due to the word count limits the novel tends to arrive in 3,000-5,000 word sections that are relatively polished then suddenly mutate into much rougher passages.

Also the sections of the novel were written over a period of a couple of years during which I ought to have learned something. I was quite dismayed when I went back to some material I’d written a couple of years ago, although I retained one chapter that was written in a completely different POV from the rest because I liked that one so much.

As it stands, from all the advice I’ve heard, the manuscript is probably significantly longer than publishers would want to consider for a writer’s first novel. If I could find an easy way of cutting it to a word count that publishers and agents might happily accept then then I’d be delighted. For example, I’ve just received some excellent feedback this morning from an ex-City coursemate who’s pointed out that I could easily lose about 5% of my word count in one recently-written section just by cutting out repetitions and echoing phrases in the dialogue and removing places where I explain in the narrative what the dialogue already states (or vice versa). I suspect a lot of the novel could be shrunk down by a similar ratio.

However, the question is whether to cut big sections and to leave the rest of the book fairly intact or should I edit down each and every sentence for brevity. I suspect that it’s a combination of both but I do think that novels with humour and social comedy will tend to, almost by definition, use more words for a given scene than thrillers and straight dramatic narratives. This because you’re often trying to surprise readers and to set up unusual situations to create the humour. My current MA writing tutor is a big fan of ‘what’s not said’ (or leaving material out). I’m intending to do this on a structural level in the narrative but, while I see the argument, I’m not convinced this can easily be done in a quirky humorous genre because a reader will inevitably fill in the gaps in the most straightforward and logical way — you can allow them to do this (as you might with suspense) in order to set up a punchline or joke but you still have to use the extra words in the end to create the humour.

To illustrate the point, here’s one I drew up that I think illustrates the point I’m at with the novel. I have good bits and not so good bits and parts that are relevant to the plot and sections that are more tangential. These can be mapped on a quadrant a bit like this:

Novel Revision 'Magic Quadrant'
Novel Revision 'Magic Quadrant'

And a note to any management consultants reading this who fancy ripping this off — the quadrant is mine (maybe I’ll write a creative writing book one day for burnt out consultants who’ll love this stuff?). In the meantime, I’ll license it to you for big bucks if you grovel.

So basically that means I have badly written material that’s essential to the novel plot and better written material that’s not so crucial. Rather than the facile (and perhaps deliberately sabotaging) advice of ‘kill your darlings’, I think I’d rather be more eco-friendly and recycle them back into the plot.

I have a list already of many aspects of the novel that are inconsistent and wrong and just plain embarrassing. But I’ve also come up with a list of really good additions and tweaks from sitting down and assembling it as a whole. Seems scary to think of putting more in a 173k document but hopefully I’ll get a second opinion on the stuff that really needs weeding out.

However, I’ve also wondered whether I could get two novels out of this and whether that might be another option (although I’d need to alter the narrative and the general structure) — though if any agents are reading (one can live in optimism), my intention is to try and get to about 120,000 words eventually, if possible.

I guess it’s not surprising that the novel is so long when I routinely write blog posts that are more lengthy than virtually anyone else’s. I guess the tangential nature of this blog is also reflected in the novel text.

But it might be incoherent, full of faults and inconsistencies and, in places, mystifying to read but the draft is done. Now I can try and get more than 5 hours sleep a night.

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Thatch

Red Lion Avebury from This Is Wiltshire
Fire At Red Lion, Avebury from This Is Wiltshire

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Red Lion in Avebury — it’s the most typically English thing imaginable — a half-timbered, thatched pub situated right in the middle of one of the most significant ancient sites in the world — the famous stone circle.

In a typically English prosaic touch, the pub isn’t preserved in an idyllic garden but has a busy A-road passing right by the front door — and, when I’ve visited, this had brought a load of bikers stopping off to provide the pub’s clientèle — not ruddy-faced yokels.

In the current draft of the novel, it’s mentioned at least twice (Kim and Emma are into the stones’ energy) — and the exterior looks quite like I imagine The Angel itself to look — particularly the thatching.

As the photo shows above, the Red Lion became one of the many thatched hostleries to catch on fire — fortunately this was contained in the Red Lion’s case but I know at least three pubs (at least two that were thatched) that have burned down into a shell in the last ten years within 15 miles of where I live: the Woolpack, Stoke Mandeville — rebuilt extraordinarily quickly; the Bottle and Glass, Gibraltar (between Aylesbury and Thame); and the Rising Sun, Ickford (a village in the wilds up near J8 of the M40). Fortunately all have been rebuilt and all are thriving.

So, thinking of plot ideas, if I have a lovely thatched pub in my novel, it wouldn’t be too improbable for some similar catastrophe to hit the building, would it?

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The Rules of Creative Writing

In January I asked on Facebook and Twitter if any of my writing friends could supply some examples of the mythical ‘Rules of Creative Writing’ (they’re really like urban myths) for my essay for the Creative Writing MA — which was really an exercise for me to take out one of my hobby horses on an extended canter. I said I’d post the responses up on my blog which I’m doing now I’ve had the essay marked — and discovered, to my relief, that what I thought was something of a rant, had passed rather than failed, as I feared it might have done.

So here are rules identified by friends from the City University Certificate in Novel Writing via Facebook (thanks to Guy Russell, Rick Kellum and Charlotte Haigh):

  • Point of View switches – but they can sometimes be ok – even EM Forster’s ‘Aspects of a Novel’ says so
  • Uninterrupted page of dialogue – John Fowles does this a lot – so does Hemingway.
  • ‘Make your character likeable’ – lots of examples where they aren’t! Eg American Psycho!
  • ‘Remove noise words’ – for some first-person voices they’re an important part of the character
  • Never start a chapter with dialogue.
  • Never begin a sentence with “and”.
  • And of course, write what you know. How many dull novels about young men moving to the city to become writers has that last rule produced?
  • You’ve already got the adverbs one. Ditto adjectives.
  • Also, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Excellent advice in most cases, but there are exceptions.
  • And maybe something about the importance of strong plot, which I think is partly just a taste and fashion thing – I’ve read a lot of early-to-mid 20th century novels this year without strong plots, and they have still been brilliant, gripping reads (Carson McCullers, Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys).

And here are the four that I particularly concentrated on in the essay, which I’d identified through reading similarly sceptical blog postings (such as those by Debi Alper, Emma Darwin and Nicola Morgan) and ‘how-to’ books (notably Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’).

  • ‘You must not over-write’ – a rule that aims to curb excessive or indulgent writing but can, if misapplied, limit ambition and innovation.
  • ‘Adverbs suck’ – this is the most extreme form of much advice about diction which discourages writers from using types of word such as adjectives and adverbs but also celebrates a conservative approach to vocabulary.
  • ‘Do not have whole pages of dialogue’
  • ‘Show don’t tell’ – this injunction is widely used for many different purposes and interpretations and has many subordinate rules that seek to influence narrative strategy and form (e.g. description, tense, character interior/exterior,etc.).
The 3,300 words were put together in a frenzied couple of days so the prose and formatting aren’t wonderful but if you’re interested in reading the whole diatribe (which has now passed muster at MA level) then click on the link to read –> Reading Novels 2 Assessment MMU MA in Creative Writing.

 

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Dickensian London

I took this photo while on the pub crawl described below. The large lamp hangs outside Ye Old Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The street posts show it’s in the City of London while floodlit St.Paul’s almost hangs in the sky like a spectral moon.

A Dickensian View of Fleet Street

As mentioned elsewhere, the slope of Fleet Street downwards is one side of the valley where the hidden river Fleet runs underground. When you realise there’s a river there the geography of London seems quite different and it’s almost possible to imagine what it would be like without any buildings.

There are suggestions that this route had some sort of mythical significance for prehistoric settlers in the area — that a ley line runs towards St.Paul’s along Fleet Street and that Ludgate Circus (at the bottom of the valley half way between where the photo was taken and St.Paul’s) was the site of a stone circle and megalith.

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A Dickens of a Pub Crawl

As anyone who’d watched TV or picked up a newspaper since Christmas will know, 2012 is the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of arguably Britain’s greatest novelist. If you’re a person with more modern tastes in literature you may believe that the quality of his actual writing is less laudable (he uses plenty of adverbs and adjectives, omniscient narrators and other contemporary sins), you’d still have to concede the lasting influence of Dickens on British society and culture.

I would be interesting to see how a modern-day Dickens fared in a creative writing workshop. As Armando Ianucci argued in his recent BBC programme celebrating Dickens, it’s the writer’s gift for creating memorable characters, evoking setting, raging against social injustice and, above all, as a humorist that make his works so memorable — and so widely adapted into other media. Character, setting, theme and the ability to give a reader the sheer enjoyment of reading are vital ingredients of a successful novel but are very difficult to teach on creative writing courses that necessarily focus on analysing shorter passages.

I bought Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature for my recent MA essay on The Rules of Creative Writing and Nabokov uses a lecture on Bleak House to examine Dickens’s techniques in detail. Nabokov identifies thirteen different different attributes of the style of Dickens’s language — including repetition, evocative names, plays on words, oblique description of speech, epithets and something called the Carlylean Apostrophic Manner.

Nabokov criticises Dickens’s storytelling ability but still rates his as a great writer, as well as a particularly enjoyable one to read. Bearing in mind the extended form of the novel Nabokov says ‘Control over a constellation of characters and themes, the technique of holding people and events bunched together, or of evoking absent characters through dialogue — in other words, the art of not only creating people but keeping created people alive within the reader’s mind throughout a long novel — this, of course, is the obvious sign of greatness.’

This last point is so obvious it often seems to be omitted from a list of techniques required by novel writers — ‘the art…of creating people [and] keeping [them] alive’ — all other novelists techniques are really subordinate this aim.

Dickens’s actual birth date is the 7th February, next Tuesday, but I’m paying tribute to the great man in a way that he would surely approve of — by organising a pub crawl around some of the drinking establishments that he visited himself and featured in his novels. So tomorrow (as I write it — Friday 3rd February for clarification) I will be leading a party in literary homage visiting the following places at approximately the following times:

6pm Cittie of York, 22 High Holborn, WC1V 6BS (Chancery Lane Tube) – The Cittie of York is on the site of Gray’s Inn Coffee House, mentioned in both David Copperfield and Barnaby Rudge.

6.45pm Knight’s Templar, 95 Chancery Lane, WC1A 2DT — not much of a Dickens association apart from being in the middle of Chancery Lane — so bang in legal London — it’s a Wetherspoon conversion of what was apparently the Union Bank.

7.30pm Ye Old Cheshire Cheese,  145 Fleet Street, EC4A 2BU — the current building dating to a rebuild in 1667, Ye Old Cheshire Cheese was one of Charles Dickens’s favourite pubs, along with many other famous authors. It is likely the inspiration for a pub on Fleet Street mentioned in The Tale of Two Cities.

8.15pm Ye Old Mitre, 1 Ely Court, Ely Place, EC1N 6SJ — Dickens was known to drink in the historic and secluded Old Mitre — a pub that has so much bizarre history (its licence used to be granted in Cambridgeshire until the 1950s) it could fill its own guidebook.

9pm Craft Beer Company, 82 Leather Lane, EC1N 7TR — close to Bleeding Heart Yard (in Little Dorrit*) but it’s the best new beer pub in London (*anyone know which flower’s most well-know variety is named after this novel?)

9.45pm The One Tun, 125-6 Saffron Hill, EC1N 8QS – The One Tun is believed to have inspired Oliver Twist. The Three Cripples fictional public house was located next door to the One Tun and a real-life Fagin lived nearby. Dickens drank in the pub from 1833-1838.

If you’re in any of those pubs on Friday 3rd February then come and say hello — although it might need to be a virtual one via the blog. If I say you’ll be able to spot me as I’ll be semi half-cut (a tautology I used in work submitted on my MA course) with a group of around half-a-dozen males looking desperate for the next ale then it won’t be much use as half the pub will answer that description.

Some of the historical information was gathered from Time Out’s recent Dickens edition and some from the interesting Digital Dickens site.

Anyone familiar with London will notice that this subset of pubs with Dickens associations is in the Holborn-Fleet Street- Farringdon-Clerkenwell area — not a particularly touristy part of the city even now — and one that changed a greatly in the nineteenth century with, among other developments, the culverting of the River Fleet in the Farringdon area in conjunction with the construction of the Metropolitan Railway — the world’s first underground.  (Crossrail now means the Farringdon area is being dug up all over again.)

Even so, the area north of Hatton Garden around Gray’s Inn Road and Mount Pleasant and stretching towards King’s Cross retains a more raffish atmosphere than most parts of London — this was the territory of Bill Sykes and his presence still seems to permeate the area. Perhaps it’s the geography of the area — much more vertical separation than most of London with a roads on different levels and a few steep streets?

I’m attracted to exploring these lesser known parts of London and the characters in my novel will make a journey on the other side of the Fleet valley (the contours of a river valley are very noticeable, particularly where Clerkenwell Road crosses the Metropolitan Line near Farringdon station) from Shoreditch to Bankside via Hoxton, Finsbury, Clerkenwell, St.Paul’s and Blackfriars — not the areas you normally find on the open-topped bus routes.

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Sie Liebt Dich

I was writing the novel in the small hours of last Friday night and it seemed apt to drop into the dialogue the German title of one of the two songs the Beatles sang in translation for the German market in their early years. Virtually everyone in Western civilsation and beyond knows about the Beatles’ apprenticeship in Hamburg.

In fact at the end of last year I went to see — and thoroughly enjoyed — the musical Backbeat at the Duke of York’s Theatre on St. Martin’s Lane which is based on the young Beatles experience in Germany. By remarkable co-incidence, Ruta Gedmintas stars in Backbeat — playing the artist Astrid Kirchherr who is credited with being a huge influence on the embryonic Beatles. (It closes at the end of February so I’d recommend anyone to go and see it. I got seats in the second row, which was rather marvellous.)

But it’s probably only Beatles fans that know that the band sang German translations of She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand — and apparently these recordings are particularly rare as they were made in Paris — the only session the Beatles ever recorded outside the UK.

Co-incidentally, after I’d written the a reference to Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand, the other translation Sie Liebt Dich turned up on my phone on shuffle when I was going for a run yesterday. Listening to familiar songs sung in a different language must be a little like the experience of non-native English speakers listening to popular music, which is predominantly sung in English more or less everywhere.

The lyrics to She Loves You/Sie Liebt Dich are actually so simple (although effective) that I could understand virtually all of the German translation, even with my limited grasp of the language. (Having spent much of the last 10 years making business trips to Germany, I’m much better at understanding German — from overhearing conversations, watching TV, reading newspapers/billboards — than speaking it myself.) I guess that a familiarity with hearing simple English almost ubiquitously in popular culture must give non-native English speakers much more confidence when learning the language.

I’ve found a couple of German-originated clips of the songs on You Tube.

Sie Liebt Dich should appear below (except if, like me you’re using Chrome when, for some odd reason it fails to show):

I haven’t done a detailed comparative analysis but my initial impression is that Paul McCartney’s vocal is far more prominent on the German version than the English recording of She Loves You. I can well imagine McCartney being much more willing to put himself out to do whatever he could commercially when the Beatles were breaking through whereas Lennon would probably have treated it like an embarrassing joke.

She Loves You is one of the first songs I ever remember. It was released before I was born but I remember playing my parent’s copy as a young child on an old record player — and probably wrecking it too. It’s a paradoxical song. I’d never list it as anywhere close to being one of my favourite Beatles tracks but I always enjoy listening to it a lot more than I thought I would.

The ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ refrain might be putting me off — what was seen as rebellious and daring nearly 50 years ago seem fairly puerile now. But the rest of the song is so densely packed with hooks (harmonies, furious drum fills, the fascinating atonal chord at the end) and played with such energy that it stands as a condensed version of what makes a great pop song — or any commercial work of art. It’s instructive to me with my writing — surely I can write a chapter with characters having dinner in less than 8,000 words if so much can be packed into two and half minutes of music and be all the greater for it?

An argument can be made that the popularity of the Beatles marked the emergence (at least into the mainstream) of art-driven, hedonistic youth culture. See this quotation from the brilliant Ian MacDonald from ‘Revolution in the Head”If it has any message at all, that of  I Want to Hold Your Hand, is of “Let go — feel how good it is”. This implied…a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status quo. Harbouring no conscious subversive attempt, the Beatles, with this record, perpetrated a culturally revolutionary act.’

Ironically, after the feedback session I had with the MMU MA class this evening, I’ll probably end up cutting the section with Komm Gib Me Deine Hand mentioned but I’m sure I can work in the reference somewhere else.

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Gesamtkunstwerk

The title of this post is a German word that’s been adopted into English usage in the art world and translates roughly as total artwork — which I suppose is similar to the concept of total football as played by the Brazilian team of 1970 — as the ideal and ultimate, all-embracing example of a skill (so the defenders could dribble like strikers and vice versa). In aesthetics Gesamtkunstwerk is similarly ‘a synthesising of different art forms into one, all-embracing, unique genre’.

The quotation above comes from the catalogue of an exhibition called Gesamtkunstwerk currently running at the Saatchi Gallery just off the King’s Road in London. It’s a collection of work subtitled ‘New Art from Germany’ — so writing about a contemporary German artist in my novel I thought I’d better visit.

I’m not much of an art expert, particularly on sculptures and installations, but I found the quick visit I had around the gallery in my lunch hour to be quite fascinating. There was a fair amount of what most people would find quite bizarre — bits of cloth threaded on to sticks and so on — but even the more abstract sculptures seemed to have something of a theme about materialism and post-industrial society. Scrap metal and other discarded objects were often used as materials.

Similarly, there were a fair number of collages formed out of pictures taken from popular culture. I’m a bit ambivalent about ‘real’ artists creating collages — it seems like cheating to me to chop up existing images (presumably the copyright of someone else) and just re-arrange them in a different pattern. But that’s all related to the debate about artist as craftsperson and creator or artist as an interpreter and re-imaginer. One artist whose collages made an impression on me was Kirstine Roepstorff, who’s actually a Dane working in Germany. She had an impressive collage that looked like it had been set in Center Parcs called ‘You Are Being Lied To’ (by men apparently — it’s a feminist statement) but I marginally preferred a science-fiction flavoured work called ‘All Possible Experiences’ which I’ve linked to below via the Saatchi Gallery website.

All Possible Experiences -- Kirstine Roepstorff -- from Saatchi Gallery
All Possible Experiences -- Kirstine Roepstorff -- from Saatchi Gallery

I also liked Stefan Kürten’s architecturally inspired paintings, which reminded me of all the solidly-built, brutalistic office blocks that I’ve worked in myself in Germany over the last 10 years or so.

I was impressed by Georg Herold’s two sculptures (both called ‘Untitled’). These were both of female figures created out of wooden battens and canvass and finished off in red or purple lacquer. The catalogue points out the paradox that the figures appear in poses that are sexualised and festishistic yet they are made using very dehumanised materials (not the smooth marble, bronze or plaster that one might normally associate with representations of the human form).

Georg Herold Untitled 2010 -- in Gestamtkunstwerk at the Saatchi Gallery
Georg Herold Untitled 2010 -- in Gestamtkunstwerk at the Saatchi Gallery

While all the artwork is new, the artists themselves are a mixture of ages. (I bought the catalogue as it has CVs of all the artists and I’ll use it to construct a more credible apprenticeship for Kim.) There are some young artists but there also some éminences grise. Isa Genzken had several peculiar assemblages of objects on show — according to the Time Out preview she has been more influential in the German art scene than Gerhard Richter. I’ve not blogged about it but I went to see the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Richter’s work (Panorama) last year and I think I’d rather part with money to see a retrospective of his work than Genzken’s – but then what do I know? (Well I suppose I know quite a bit more about German art than I did a couple of years ago.)

I’d not been to the Saatchi Gallery before so the highlight of my visit wasn’t the art from Germany but the fascinating Richard Wilson work 20: 50. This is a huge tank of used sump oil with a mirror smooth surface that is viewed from a platform slightly above. It’s amazing — a black void that’s also invisible and reflective.

We had another workshop session with Emily today and I took the opportunity of being up in the general area to visit the London Art Fair at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Not having the financial means myself to set up as a dabbler in art collection, I realised that I’m fairly ignorant about the business of art — how galleries and dealers interact with artists and collectors. I was a little reluctant to pay well over £10 for a ticket to an event which seemed to be geared around selling things but I was incredibly glad that I did. I only spent about two and a half hours there but could easily have spent twice as long. The effect of walking around the exhibition with so much art on display was visually intoxicating — and mixing with that arty type of person will hopefully inform my writing of Kim.

While most of the artwork was up for sale, there was plenty of work from well known artists that could be viewed as it would be in a gallery. I didn’t have time to track down the Damien Hirst and David Hockney pieces (and if the gallery owners had looked at my shoes then I doubt they’d have given me the time of day) but I did come across a couple of Beryl Cook pictures quite unexpectedly.

From my fairly random strolling around the stalls I noted the following artists (and their exhibiting galleries) as those I particularly liked. Pamela Stretton’s  mosaic-like works at the Mark Jason Gallery were intriguing (rewarding both close up and distant viewing). I also liked the abstract cityscapes painted by Alicia Dubnyckj and Jenny Pocket at Sarah Myerscough Fine Art. On a similarly geographical theme I also enjoyed Tobias Till and Susan Stockwell’s work at TAG Fine Arts. (Susan Stockwell’s ‘China Gold’ is about the most eloquent commentary on globalisation and the credit crunch that I’ve yet seen — if I had £3,500 to spare I’d buy one of the 5 copies.)

For research purposes I was less interested in the famous artists and more in those who made a living at their art but have yet to hit the heights — which is the position the novel finds Kim to be in. Because of this interest, I managed to get a place on a guided tour of the Art Projects section of the fair which is dedicated to new and emerging artists.

The tour was given by Art Projects’ curator Pryle Behrman who explained the recurrent themes that appeared to be common in much of the work. Unsurprisingly a lot of art commented on the economic situation but he said there was also an emergence of playfulness and a rejection of the concept of artists as a profound commentator. He said that many artists realised that art fairs where work was sold to speculators at inflated prices (like the one we were at) were part of the problem with the naked greed strain of capitalism — so artists as a whole could hardly be holier-than-thou about it.

To emphasise the point, one of the most striking exhibits was the corbettPROJECTS ‘Ghost of a Dream’ by Adam Ekstrom and Lauren Was. They create spectacular but fragile displays decorated with used lottery scratch cards and covers of romantic novels.

Perhaps the most bizarre, but also thought provoking, was the work of Jenny Keane who sketches stills from horror movies in black and white line drawings. She then licks the most horrific part of the picture (such as where a vampire might strike on the neck) and does so with such intensity and endurance that she not only scrapes a hole in the paper but makes her tongue bleed in the process (see photo here). The blood and saliva seep into the paper around the hole — and are listed as artistic materials when the works are sold — see here.

The boundary between physical and intellectual, which Jenny Keane is breaking down by embedding her bodily fluids into the artwork, is something that probably polarises the ‘artistic’ community and the respectable bourgeoisie who might like to collect their works. I briefly mentioned about 3 months ago that I went to see the Pipilotti Rist show ‘Eyeball Massage’ when it was on at the Hayward Gallery. Rist is not shy of using her own body to make her point as an artist. Although it’s never titillating or prurient, she appears naked in some of her works and one of the best known, Mutaflor, features shots from a camera that appears to emerge out of her anus — which is fleetingly shown in close-up.

This was all shown at a flagship exhibition at one of  Britain’s leading visual art galleries so it’s understandable that in the novel this is the metropolitan attitude than Kim blithely takes with her into the Home Counties sticks — but will her very liberal attitudes go down well with the respectable commuting and country types?

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Voice

Christmas Bestsellers 2011
Christmas Bestsellers 2011

There’s a lot of discussion in creative writing courses about how authors can find their voice. It’s quite a difficult concept to articulate — most simplistically it’s what defines the distinctiveness of an author’s style. This may, depending on the author, be generic to all their output or restricted to a subset of their work. Also there is debate about how some authors use a consistent voice whereas others vary their narrative voice according to the tone of different parts of a book. In this post I’m mainly concerned with the sort of authorial voice that suffuses most of a writer’s work.

Maybe one of the best ways of capturing an author’s voice was to do what we did in the most recent term of the MMU MA course — when every week a couple of us would contribute a short piece of original writing ‘in the style of’ whichever author we’d discussed the previous week in the Reading Novels module.

So I contributed short pieces inspired by Vladmir Nabokov, Margaret Drabble and John Banville (in the guise of Benjamin Black). I couldn’t help my examples of writing go beyond even pastiche and into the territory of parody — but with different degrees of subtlety they seemed to work.

It was fascinating to see how the other students tackled the exercises too. Who were the literary chameleons who could identify the elements that made another writer’s work distinctive and impose these on their pieces — and who were the types who would nod in the direction of the writer’s style but still make the piece recognisably theirs. Sometimes there were students who alchemically combined the two — both embracing the writer who inspired the piece and also making it unerringly their own.

Writing parodies or pastiches is an incredibly useful exercise — according to one of my friends at Metroland Poets, W.H.Auden said that if he was to teach poetry then he’d restrict it to parodies only.

But imitating other writers, even if it gives a fascinating insight into their techniques, isn’t going to establish a new writer with an unmistakeable voice – the sort of semi-mythical, startling new voice that agents say leaps off the slush pile and transfixes their attention for hours. I guess agents spend enough time reading submissions that they’re the experts at spotting voice leaping from the written page. I tend towards the romantic notion that your writing personality is like a fingerprint or indelible watermark: uncontrollably unique like your spoken voice and the result of hundreds of thousands of experiences and encounters as well as reflecting your genetic personality. How it’s formed must be the subject of many literary PhDs –also witness the popularity of books like Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens.

The spoken voice analogy is where the horribly blurry photo comes in at the top of this post. It shows books on promotion as Christmas presents at a local W.H.Smith branch.  It’s a collection mainly of celebrity memoirs and TV cookery tie-ins — which as the Guardian’s round up of Nielsen’s Bookscan sales figures shows comprised the bulk of the top sellers this year (apart from David Nicholls’s ‘One Day‘).

My wife was reading the Michael McIntyre book and said ‘You can imagine him speaking every single line of this’  and then I realised the stunningly obvious fact about the whole selection: the common factor shared by virtually every single one of these books is that they are purportedly written by (or about) people whose spoken voices are very familiar to the reading public — clearly McIntyre, the Hairy Bikers, James Corden, Lee Evans, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall but also, in the collective memory, Steve Jobs and Jonny Wilkinson.

Knowing the public persona of the (supposed) author immediately changes the way a book is read. There’s no discovery process about the author (or the voice of the author) — if the author’s meant to be a celebrity then it immediately contextualises the words on the page for the reader.

I was flicking through Alison Baverstock’s ‘Marketing Your Book’ and noted another glaringly obvious (but revelatory) point she made: unlike repeatable commodities such as bread or milk or shoes, books aren’t bought more than once (except on occasion for presents and the like). That’s why publishers must love franchises. Readers might spend ages deliberating and prevaricating about trying something new but once they know they like an author then they’re hopeful of the same pleasurable experience again and will repeat purchase — part of the reason why book series are so attractive to publishers. It’s also inherent in the behaviour of book buyers — people go out to get the new Terry Pratchett, Lee Child, Sophie Kinsella and so on because they know they’ll encounter something familiar — if not the same characters then certainly the authorial voice.

Perhaps what’s most terrifying for putative writers who aren’t celebrities is the question of whether theirs is a voice that people want to hear? For a comedian or celebrity chef their written voice is something they don’t need to worry about making their own — the cover page and their TV appearance should see to that. But if it’s a first novel then the authorial voice will be new and unfamiliar (unless it’s an attempt at bandwagon-jumping and imitating someone else). That’s why activities that promote new writers, such as literary prizes and competitions, are so important. (Speaking of which, one of my ex-City coursemates — Bren Gosling whose blog is linked in the sidebar — has had the great news that the manuscript of his recently finished novel — ‘Sweeping Up the Village’ has been put on the longlist for the Harry Bowling prize 2011.)

A final point on the W.H.Smith display is to note how little fiction it contains — only the Martina Cole and the Christopher Paolini — and the Wimpy Kid book (if that counts). Perhaps that’s a little unfair as next to the shelves was a rack containing Richard and Judy’s latest seasonal selections — all recently-published fiction. What’s also startling is the predominance of books about sportsmen, comedians and cookery.

I guess a humorous novel about an ex-rugby-playing, TV cookery show contestant who leaves an IT job to run a gastropub might have a bit of appeal to a publisher’s marketing department at least. Let’s hope 2012 at least sees it finished.

Happy new year everyone — I’m hoping the next 12 months will see the publication of some of the great writing that’s been produced by my coursemates and other writing friends.

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Wenlock Saved

I have a short update to the story of the Wenlock Arms in Hoxton, mentioned below, which is relevant to the fate of many pubs across the country.

The Wenlock is a spit-and-sawdust, East-end style local (which looks from the outside rather like a more downmarket version of the Queen Vic from EastEnders). It’s typical of an urban pub style that would have been found on virtually every street corner in Victorian London. However, the triple threats of German bombing in the second world war, post-war redevelopment and the consequences of changing leisure time activites leading to changes of use have led to such pubs becoming increasingly rare. If the buildings still stand as pubs then they’re likely to have been either gentrified into ‘bar and kitchen’ gastropubs or be vile drinking dens full of pool tables and fruit machines.

Not so the Wenlock. Mainly due to the pub’s promotion of real ale from small and microbrewers and the consequent patronage of the members of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and like minded drinkers, the Wenlock has continued as a genuine community pub — for example hosting regular live music. The phrase ‘unspoilt by progress’ (used by Banks’ for their beers in the West Midlands) could be applied accurately to the interior, which appears to have been under an informal preservation order that has seen a moratorium on any discernible interior decoration — which to the generally stylistically challenged CAMRA members is seen as a Good Thing.

As mentioned in the post on Shoreditch, the Wenlock sits in an area that is on the fringes of the Hoxton-Shoreditch urban renaissance — had it been any closer it would probably have been converted to a bijou neon place called Bar Frottage or something. However, the economic winds of redevelopment finally reached the Wenlock and an application was made to Hackney Council earlier this year.

As suggested above, planning laws mean that there’s no requirement to request permission to change the use of a pub into a similar sort of establishment, like a bar or restaurant, so long as it’s used to sell food and drink. This has been why many pubs have been ruined by being turned into failed restaurants. You could probably turn a pub into a kebab house quite happily.

However, permission is required to change the use of the building to any other sort of commercial use and, particularly, for private housing. As the price of housing is so expensive in large parts of the country, particularly London and the South East, the physical building of a pub (or even just the land it stands on) can be worth far more as an asset than the pub will ever hope to generate as a business. That’s why so many pubs are owned by speculators or giant pub companies that securitise their property portfolios in the City in exchange for cash.

In the case of the Wenlock, developers wanted to build at least five apartments on the plot. These would no doubt have sold for well over a million pounds collectively — creating a profit that would probably take a back-street boozer decades to realise. Therefore, all but the most successful pubs in this country, are only protected from the raging forces of market greed by local planning regulations. In the case of the Wenlock Hackney Council rejected the change of use application and many locals and real ale supporters celebrated this in the autumn.

However, there is a loophole which those wanting to redevelop the Wenlock sought to exploit. Premises can be denied permission for change of use but, unless a building has listed status or is in a conservation area, then the owners can do more or less anything else to it — including demolish it. This tactic has been used ruthlessly in the past where pubs have literally vanished overnight when developers have sent in bulldozers at midnight. (The famous Tommy Ducks in Manchester was an example, which was razed to the ground one night in 1993 at 3am in the morning. This pub used to have women’s knickers pinned to the ceiling — I was once taken there after a school trip to the theatre by the teachers!)

The Wenlock was just outside the Regent’s Canal Conservation area and so its locals were disturbed to see a notice of demolition attached to the building at the end of November. This is apparently a technical process to inform the council of an intention to demolish a building and normally the council can only object to the method of demolition proposed (unless the building is listed or in a conservation area). So it appeared that the Wenlock was going to be turned into a patch of waste ground — with the presumed intention of later lobbying for the original residential development once the pub had become only a memory.

But the pub’s supporters mounted a huge campaign (there’s a Facebook group called Save the Wenlock, which I belong to) and mobilised a coalition of beer drinkers and lovers of vernacular architecture to lobby Hackney council themselves. The pub could have been demolished, as I understand it, from about the 22nd December.

On Monday 19th December at a meeting of Hackney Council, the conservation area was extended to include the Wenlock Arms. The pub had been, possibly, days from demolition but has now been preserved — the fabric of the building and its permitted usage at least — whether the owners want to hang on to it with no prospect of it being anything other than a somewhat down-at-heel looking boozer is an open question. (There’s a very detailed historical and architectural account of the area — and an adjoining pub, the King William IV — on the council website.)

Fortunately there won’t be the traditional, short-lived rush to celebrate the preservation of an amenity that few people actually used — as happens often when economically struggling pubs are denied permission to change use. The Wenlock has never seemed to want for customers, which shows what a bleak outlook there is for less busy pubs when customers have less disposable income, beer duty is rising and inflation (especially utility prices) is rising fast.

As with most retailers, Christmas and New Year are the best times of year for pubs and there will be many publicans who will trade up until New Years Eve, bank the Christmas takings, and then shut down for good. The Wenlock’s success story is rare but it’s salutary and an example of what community action can achieve.

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Broad Beans and Sea Urchins

Writing-in-Situ---Tate-Modern
Writing in the Field -- Tate Modern Espresso Bar

I was in London today and took the time to do a bit of novel-related research. I’m planning on setting a small part of my novel in the Tate Modern and so thought it might be in the spirit of the novel to actually write some of it there.

So, as the picture shows to the left, my netbook is out next to my Tate cappuccino while I wrote a few hundred words about what my characters were doing in the same place — I’m not sure if that does anything for the authenticity of the words on the page but it probably helps me feel that I have some sort of credibility in attempting to use this as a location.

I guess the photo is a bit symbolic in showing the subject of the writing along with the means by which it’s intended to be captured — the Word 2007 screenshot.

The floor where I was sitting is home to the current Gerhard Richter exhibition. This is an incredibly well-reviewed exhibition featuring the works of one of the world’s leading artists, who happens to be German, which fits a little with my novel.

I went to see the exhibition (it’s one of those you have to pay to go in) about five or six weeks ago and was actually very impressed with it. Richter is an incredibly versatile artist who’s created abstract art as well as fascinating landscapes and portraits and still lives — two of his works are exceptionally well known: one of his daughter turning her head and another of a candle that was used on a Sonic Youth album cover .

The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia
The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia at Christ Church Greyfriars

I then had a look around Daunt Books’ new Cheapside shop.

Nowadays I have to enter bookshops with a resolution of steel — I WILL NOT BUY MORE BOOKS (because I haven’t even got room for all those I currently have — let alone time to read them all). But as soon as I set foot over the threshold I’m ready to be seduced.

And seduction was on the menu for the book I found on one of the tables in the store was The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia by Mark Douglas Hill. And seeing as my novel has lots of food in it and relationships then it immediately attracted my interest.

Co-incidentally I was pleased to see this book as I’ve spent an amount of time on the web trying to see if I could get any more seriously foodie information on this subject myself and oddly enough the range of websites that come up tend to be a bit gimmicky or commercial.

I won’t reveal exactly what my intentions are for purchasing this particular volume of literature to peruse but I think some of the more unusual combinations might give me a bit of fun.

Looking through the table of contents, I initially wondered what wasn’t an aphrosidiac — there were quite a few foodstuffs that are pleasant to eat but perhaps not best known for their aphrodisiac qualities — e.g. steak, honey, caviar, chocolate (although I guess a lot depends on how one might use the last three on that list).

Then there are the sensual or symbolic foods that would go on any Valentine’s night menu — oysters, asparagus, truffles, figs and maybe a few others.

I was quite puzzled over the aphrodisiac qualities of some of the book’s contents — watermelon, celery, pine nuts, quince, anchovies, cheese (which sort — presumably not Stinking Bishop, which I bought recently from Neal’s Yard). Having read some of the foods’ entries these less erotic inclusions appear to made on the strength of their vitamin and mineral content — zinc being a favourite plus various amino acids or similar, like trpytophan, which apparently triggers the release of the feel-good hormone dopamine. Apparently, the book says, eating a banana mimics in a presumably more muted way the taking of ecstasy.

The book gives a recipe (for two, obviously) for each of the ingredients — and some look rather nice. I’d guess most lovers would appreciate a well-cooked meal, even if the ingredients were fairly commonly eaten anyway — like eggs or pineapple. However, some choices seemed utterly bizarre — such as broad beans. How a food so unavoidably associated with flatulence can be considered at all sexually alluring is something of a mystery — apparently it’s all something to do with the ancient Greeks and Pythagoras and the supposed similarity in the bean’s shape to the male gonad (and it also produces dopamine, apparently — better tell the ravers).

At least broad beans are quite familiar unlike some of the aphrodisiacs. The most unusual include pufferfish, sea urchin and iguana. I’d probably rather breakfast on cold pizza in the morning or a leftover kebab heated in the microwave than eat sea urchin. But, then again, in the words of 10cc, eating pufferfish might be one of the things we do for love.

As for iguana, I don’t think even the characters in my novel would go so far as serving that up in pursuit of seduction. (Apparently iguanas have some powerful glands in their inner thighs that produce powerful sex pheromones, which causes them to be turned into an aphrodisiac stew in their Native Nicaragua.) It’s a shame as the book has a recipe for ‘Roast Iguana with Chipotle and Oregano Marinade’, which would have been an interesting dish to feature in my novel. Maybe I’ll go instead for symbolism and have a character with a pet iguana which the cognoscenti will know is a symbol of their hidden, raging sexual passion.

Of course, the Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia doesn’t take itself very seriously (see the link to the author bio above). This is a point that seems to be missed in a rather humourless and contradictory review of the book in the Observer — stating that the way to spot a mediocre novelist is the inevitable use of a meal as a metaphor for sensuality but then goes on to equate eating with sex and states that an intimate meal involves ‘wearing your elemental self on your sleeve’ (maybe it’s OK to use the metaphor in a review but not a novel or maybe I’ve missed some self-reflexive irony?).

Of course  there’s not much science behind the claims for most aphrodisiacs — although the social and cultural associations of some of the better known foods in the book are enough to make the consumption of these foods in the right context a suggestive and potentially innuendo laden act. I’m sure I can put the research to good effect.

And on the way between the Tate Modern and Daunt Books where I was seduced by this volume, I walked over the Millennium Bridge, which gave me the opportunity to monitor the progress of the Shard again. This time I’ve got a smeary-lensed, city scape with what my blogging acquaintance Female PTSD describes as a giant Issey Miyake perfume bottle (that’s an analogy as a male I never would have got).

The Shard 6th December 2011
The Shard Nearly Finished -- 6th December 2011
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When I Grow Rich…

…ring the bells of Shoreditch in Oranges and Lemons, Shoreditch being where mos of the start of my novel is set, although I very much doubt the bells of St. Leonard’s are going to help me get rich by writing it.  (The church is apparently features on current BBC series Rev, which is also set in Shoreditch.)

I’ve visited Shoreditch many times while I’ve been writing the novel, particularly recently, and I think I’ve noticed the most recent stages in its metamorphosis from run-down, working class area to the predominantly cool artists’ neighbourhood that it is today — although you don’t need to wander too far away from the Rivington Road/Shoreditch High Street area to find yourself in some very unartistic-looking, grim housing estates.

Bishopsgate
Bishopsgate from the Edge of the City

Perhaps the opening of Shoreditch High Street overground station about 18 months ago has been a catalyst as now the area is linked directly to south London and the North London Line at Dalston.

Shoreditch is surprisingly close to the City of London and its concentration of wealthy financial services workers. The photo below is taken from Shoreditch  — the marker post on the right side of the photo shows the City of London boundary marker.

It’s an extraordinary transition point with the Broadgate development on the right along Bishopsgate and the Gherkin in the distance. The street where I stood to take the photo is a very short length of road called Norton Folgate which connects Bishopsgate with Shoreditch High Street. It’s probably no more than one or two hundred yards in length but the contrast in urban landscape between its two ends is striking.

Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch
Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch
Slightly further up the road, looking away from the City is Great Eastern Street. This very ordinary looking street is actually London’s inner ring road — connecting the end of the dual carriageway at King’s Cross with Tower Bridge via Angel and Old Street. Village Underground with its tube trains on the roof can be spotted in the middle-distance.
After our first workshopping session of the autumn at Mike B’s in Old Street, I visited Village Underground’s large warehouse space (what the trains sit on top of) for the Moniker Art Exhibition in October , which was timed to co-incide with the big London Frieze event in Regent’s Park (at £27 a ticket that was a bit steep for me). But there was a lot of really good at the Moniker Event — and the space at Village Underground was a good venue for it.
It’s surprising that hundreds of years after the Roman and medieval walls of London fell into disrepair that it feels as if there’s still some psychological separation between inside and outside their boundaries.
Shakespeare Acted Here
Not the Globe Theatre but Noisy, Dirty, Anonymous Curtain Road, Shoreditch

All types of disreputable activities occurred in areas like Shoreditch, just outside the City walls and, in the late sixteenth century, this included actors and playwrights, along with all the other undesirables cast outside the City walls like thieves and prostitutes. Just around the corner from Village Underground is this plaque in Curtain Road, which is a very understated memorial to the Curtain Theatre – a predecessor of the Rose and Globe Theatres in much more historically celebrated Bankside.

London’s first theatre (called The Theatre) was located somewhere around the area between Curtain Road, Village Underground and Shoreditch High Street which has had the track for the new

Rivington Street, Shoreditch
Rivington Street, Shoreditch

overground station laid right through it. It’s incredible to think that this area of Victorian warehouses, 60s office blocks and surface car parks was a crucible of the English language — where Shakespeare started his writing career.

Very close to the Shakespeare plaque is the Old Blue Last — a live-music venue described by NME on its website as  ‘the world’s coolest pub’ and continuing Shoreditch’s history of alternative entertainment. A roll-call of the ‘coolest’ acts of the 2000s have appeared at the pub including Amy Winehouse, Florence and the Machine, (Gordon Brown’s favourites) the Arctic Monkeys, the Vaccines and many more.
Old Blue Last, Shoreditch
Old Blue Last, Shoreditch

Places like the Old Blue Last won’t have deterred the arrival of trendy artist types in the area and I thought the photo below shows an appropriate clash of old and new — über-cool American Apparel (apparently the shop where Ruta Gedmintas bought her outfits for Frankie in Lip Service) has opened up next to a pub improbably called the Barley Mow.

Old and New on Curtain Road
Old and New on Curtain Road

Actually the Barley Mow is only a traditional looking boozer from the outside, as I found when I organised a pub crawl starting at the pub, and found that the price of a pint of their Fuller’s ale was a far from working-class £3.70.

A group of us did 8 pubs in all in a route from Shoreditch to Islington via Old Street and the Regent’s Canal. Second on the list was the also archaically named

Bricklayer's Arms Shoreditch
Probably Not Many Bricklayers in Here Any More -- Bricklayer's Arms, Shoreditch

Bricklayer’s Arms (thought the punctuation of the name suggests there was only one tradesman).

On the crawl was the ultimate down-at-heel boozer that’s been the unlikely beneficiary of being turned into a nationally famous ale drinkers’ destination — the Wenlock Arms on the borders of Old Street and Hoxton.

It’s in a very mixed area with new apartments being developed around the Wenlock Basin on the Regent’s Canal but also being situated in the middle of the sprawl of forbidding-looking council estates that border the trendy centres of Shoreditch and Hoxton.

Wenlock Arms, Hoxton
Wenlock Arms, Hoxton

It’s an almost stereotypically ‘unspoiled’ pub — almost falling to pieces in places — but it’s got a thriving clientele of ale drinkers (some of whom I know seek this place out from the USA) but it has been under threat recently of being redeveloped into a five storey block of flats.

It’s the sort of authentic place deserves to be preserved and, as an example of one aspect of pub culture, a pub very like it might find its way into my novel. And any inquisitive barmaid who might work in this sort of pub would certainly know how to keep and serve great beer.

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Jeremy Discusses GDP, Yoga, the Greek Referendum and Escalators

Apologies for the long absence…I have about half a dozen blog posts in various forms of readiness to publish but, for day-job related reasons and because I’m trying to write more of the actual novel, I’ve not managed to finish the posts off for a while. The following is recycled from a post I put up on our MA year group’s communal blog (it’s a closed group, I’m afraid) and it’s about how the all human life (almost) can be found in its not very flattering glory between 12 noon and 2pm on BBC Radio Two.

The Jeremy Vine show has been called Daily Mail radio and it’s quite formulaic but it’s often hilariously entertaining. Jeremy Vine himself seems to adopt this ‘reasonable man’ persona that makes most of the peculiar people and oddballs on his show think he’s being incredibly sympathetic when, in reality, I suspect he’s gently satirising them.

Whoever puts the show’s schedule together must have a surreal sense of humour. The following list (that I extracted and edited directly from the BBC website) features almost all of the topics discussed on recent shows (starting yesterday and going back a month or so).

It has some of the most bizarre combinations of subjects imaginable. Both the first and the last items on the list below are mind-boggling.

Unsurprisingly, having listened a lot to JV over the past three years, his hobby horses appear to be materialising in my writing — if you see which topics tend to recur in the list below then you might be able to get an idea of what are themes in my novel — except for wheelie bins which are a JV favourite but haven’t played a part in my writing — YET!

I was thinking of subtitling my novel ‘How Jeremy Vine Ruined My Life’.

  • Jeremy discusses GDP, yoga, the Greek referendum and escalators.
  • Jeremy discusses violent pornography, Jimmy Savile, diabetes and canoeists and anglers.
  • Vanessa Feltz discusses supermarket apprenticeships, rickets, St Paul’s and stone theft.
  • Vanessa Feltz discusses knife crime, Mandarin, teenage goths and getting online.
  • Vanessa Feltz discusses unfair dismissal, dentists, domestic violence and seagulls.
  • Vanessa Feltz discusses the EU, house husbands, St Paul’s and Japanese Knotweed.
  • Vanessa Feltz discusses the European referendum, jailed parents, Islam and wide cars.
  • Jeremy discusses Colonel Gaddafi, stamps, living alone and dogs worrying livestock.
  • Jeremy discusses Dale Farm, energy sources, foreign aid and offensive language.
  • Jeremy discusses Dale Farm, the Euro, housing problems and egg donation.
  • Jeremy discusses Hillsborough, GPs cutting patients, funeral etiquette and Gaza.
  • Jeremy discusses anti-capitalist protests, energy prices, smacking and IndyCar racing.
  • Jeremy discusses journalists, a restaurant in trouble, pornography and our allotment.
  • Jeremy discusses unemployment, Libya, care for the elderly in the NHS and being a mum.
  • Jeremy discusses the police, lottery winners, wheelie bins and a young entrepreneur.
  • Jeremy discusses quantitative easing, TV repeats, saving money & an unusual police chase.
  • Jeremy discusses Steve Jobs, hot curry, the Jarrow marchers and memorial benches.
  • Jeremy discusses credit card debt, crime in prisons, being mixed race and Theresa May.
  • Jeremy discusses the Knox verdict, drones, tube drivers and parking restrictions.
  • Jeremy discusses adoption, the Irish presidency, war graves and a tortoise sanctuary.
  • Jeremy discusses Ed Miliband, Rihanna, extra-marital affairs and the Greek bailout.
  • Jeremy discusses defence cuts, horse whipping, cancer drugs and a young Labour activist.
  • Jeremy discusses drink-driving, the economy, care for the elderly and lullabies.
  • Jeremy discusses the economy, a couple living in a shed, feminism and rag-and-bone men.
  • Jeremy discusses PFI, a London bus stabbing, genital mutilation and the Blue Peter Annual.
and I just found two classics from the last two shows:
  • Jeremy discusses the IMF, umbrellas, insurance and using hedges as toilets.
  • Jeremy discusses the Euro rescue package, arguing, secrets and kidneys.

For a longer list of topics going back to June then click here. Inspiration from Jeremy Vine

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Ready for the Shardpener

Shard 7th October 2011
Shard from the Millennium Bridge 7th October 2011

Another photo for the fans of the amazing Shard who end up landing on this blog and wondering exactly why.

It’s very close to being finished on the outside. The concrete core has reached its final height and the glass panels have almost enclosed it — the impression this photo gives me is of a huge pencil with a bit of protruding lead at the top, ready to be put into the pencil sharpener.

This photo was taken on a research run in London (see the Google map below to see exactly what route I took). I did some checking out of the locations in which I’m setting parts of my novel — mainly at the eastern end of the route.

I can’t think of a running route that would go past any more tourist sights than this one — or at least one where you could actually get up some speed. I’m not sure if New Scotland Yard or MI5’s HQ are proper sights but they were on the first stretch, then London Eye, the Southbank Centre (where I went earlier this week to see Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery), Tate Modern, Millennium Bridge, St. Paul’s, Victoria Embankment, Cleopatra’s Needle, Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

I even took my research so far I wanted to wander into the St. Paul’s Cathedral shop but, having just done 5km at the time, and dripping perspiration in puddles from my bright orange Nike running top, I decided to respect the decorum of the church and come back again another day.

More pics from other research trips to come in the next few days.

Check out my run below.


View Westminster-St.Paul’s Circular 2011-10-07 12:30 in a larger map

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Apologies to Tamara Watts

The user name below, found on an office ‘multi-function device’ (i.e. printer), appealed to my puerile streak.

Office Print Jobs
Are You Sure About Allocating That User Name?

I guess I shouldn’t laugh — maybe Mr Timothy or Ms Tamara Watts has had to deal with such sniggering throughout their lives — although the way computer user names are constructed to an unbending formula might prevent subtle ways of avoiding the construction. At least there’s a bit of ambiguity in the plural, I guess it’s even worse for someone with the surname Watt.

That particular piece of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary intrigues me as I was once pulled-up by an Open University Creative Writing student for using it in a screenplay writing assignment (and I suspect she deducted marks from the assignment in question). The objection wasn’t to the word itself — it was because I’d dared to put it in the mouth of a female character (in fact a prototype Kim).

She actually said that something along the lines of ‘a woman would never say that word’. (It might be an unwelcome consequence of feminism that many women — and I do think this is far more true of women than it is of men — seem to feel qualified to make sweeping statements on behalf of their whole gender group. It brings to mind Harriet Harman’s periodically facile assertions about women running organisations more effectively and compassionately — and in the next breath she denounces the uncaring destruction wreaked on the country by Margaret Thatcher.)

Every other woman who read that use of the word had no problem at all with it — so I don’t think it’s a gender issue — more of a generational one. Female baby-boomers, especially middle-class ones, have probably been conditioned by parents and peer-pressure not to swear in company but this doesn’t hold true for Generation X and Y — and especially not the generation who come after Y — whatever they’re called. (I’m a Generation Xer, by the way.)

‘The Angel’s’ characters straddle the boundary period between Generation X and Generation Y. (I’m using the most common definitions, according to Wikipedia, of X starting in 1964 and Y starting in 1982.) James and Emma are the tail end of the Xers, while Kim’s an early Y…and to some extent James will look at Kim as an example of a new, exciting generation (even though she’s not much younger).

But both the female Xs and Ys will swear a lot (I’m also going to have a woman Baby Boomer character too, who won’t). In fact the dialogue in the novel is so full of swearing that it breaks one of the cardinal Rules of Creative Writing that you tend to find in books — readers don’t like reading lots of profanities.

I’m not really sure about this rule on a couple of counts.

  1. I can see dialogue in which every other word is effing and blinding will be tedious but some of the most captivating speakers I’ve listened to in real life use frequent swearing in an expertly oratorical way — to contribute to the rhythm of a phrase or for comic timing — think of some of the most popular stand-up comedians.
  2. As with their reactions to sexual content, or something similarly taboo, what people say they think about a book/film/play/artwork is not necessarily what they think privately about it. I’ve blogged before about this issue might prevent honest discussion of a piece of writing in a workshopping situation — where it’s human nature for participants to use their feedback to reveal or conceal aspects of their own characters or experiences to the other participants.
  3. The advice might be sound in that it points out the costs of alienating a significant portion of a writer’s potential readership. However, if you worry too much about offending people as you’re writing then you may end up with a story as inoffensive, uninteresting and utterly bland as if it had been written by a focus group.
Mind you, having expounded about how my professional and arty middle-class characters indulge in the joy of swearing, I’ve realised that I didn’t hear a single profanity (aside from a few ribald songs) in a location that I visited today (see photo below) that, perhaps 20, 30 or 40 years ago, would have been a bastion of male working-class culture — and which is now going-on for half female and with a very cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities (I particularly liked the personalised ‘Van Der Singh’ shirt I saw someone wearing).
Old Trafford
Old Trafford Half an Hour Before Kick Off
I’m currently writing James and Kim’s initial restaurant conversation chapter and she teases him by suggesting everything about him says he’s an Arsenal fan.
Man-Utd-v-Norwich
Inside 'The Theatre of Dreams' (And No Swearing)

So Man Utd 2 Norwich 0 is my excuse for not getting that much writing done today.