Wordling

It’s been a while…six months at least, but a lot has happened in that time; well, a lot of stuff ‘around’ writing, but as ever, not much actual writing.

I went to see Dave Eggars at the (I like to keep it a secret) fabulously realised Bookslam http://www.bookslam.com/

And became a convert to the writings of Eggars; least of all for 826 Valencia http://www.826valencia.org/

Watch this space for 826 inspired project happening very soon.

I have attended and completed the most harrowing and painful and difficult and really in at the deep end with the big boys City Lit writing workshop http://tiny.cc/i1737

(How I wish I could really say what went on there, but I have to protect the innocent)….

Anyway: what I learnt: POV POINT OF VIEW

Lordy, I had no idea; I have written a 600,000 word novel without any idea about POV. No one has ever mentioned it to me before – and I have been on creative writing courses (albeit local night schools, but that is no excuse). And, man, is it a hard one.

But I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit of a fashion thing, a bit of a zeitgeist thing. As soon as I realised my errors, I dashed home and picked up a Graham Greene novel, any one would do – for me, he is my literary bible – everything I have learned I think has come from him  - anyway, I can’t remember which novel I picked up, but, sure enough, POV is not consistent, it flits from one character to another between paragraphs but still makes perfect sense. And I think that is the essence of it. It must make sense to the reader – the reader must be able to follow the story. As long as you are master of the POV, then the reader will follow; but I think – given that I didn’t actually know about POV, I have a hell of a lot of editing to do…

The  malaise of food-fuddled brain activity over the holiday period can get as tiresome as having guilt over metalicised wrapping paper disposal and its horrifying effect on the environment (!).

Worse still is the guilt over not writing over the Holidays. Each activity, say peeling sprouts or arguing with one’s relatives or traversing the country to see said relatives, is weighed up against how that time could have been spent productively writing. Ultimately, the writer must be a selfish beast. Must be.

Anyway, today I am heartened and feel the fug lifting (though London is somnolent today under the snow clouds) as I have just read Deepak Chopra rant intelligently in defense of expansive thinking:

http://tinyurl.com/ydcfeul

Most pertinently “… And the point of such a debate? To further public knowledge about the actual frontiers of science, which has always depended on wonder, awe, imagination, and speculation. Petty science of the…”

Wonder, awe, imagination and speculation. This sounds like four anchors for the making of a good story. Art and Science are long-lived bedfellows. The ‘frontier’ of novel writing: expand upon, regenerate, break boundaries, don’t be frightened of the blank page; write some words…

Still the words don’t  come. I wait. I fret. I displace. I bemoan my unproductive creativily stultified lot.

This weekend whilst the BF decided to go to Brussels (who actually decides to go there, isn’t it that you have to go there, for European Union type things?) Actually to be fair, I think there was some kind of King Leopold exploration going on, Heart of Darkness and all that. Anyway, I digress.

200 words. The whole weekend and just 200 words. Not even very good ones, just ambling rambling words. A few scribbled notes (a brief ‘ah-ha’ moment of comprehension) where perhaps the Book one/Book two devise might help with the structure, was the shining light in a weekend of gloom.

So the decision is made, I have joined a writing workshop. If the Blog – the original premise of a devise to help me write on a regualr basis – isn’t working then perhaps a writing workshop will. Group pressure terror is an excellent motivation: to up your game, your standards and your productivity.

City Lit have some excellent courses that come highly recommended.

http://tinyurl.com/ybbnwyt



Robert Rodriguez

I can’t hear enough about how writers (published ones that is) write. (Though of course there are many who rightly decline to answer this intrusive question). One of my favourite things to do is attend book readings and sit quietly in awe of the writer reading their words from the page. The last was Kazuo Ishiguro at the South Bank. When asked about his contribution to literature – all of six books, not including the collection Nocturnes, of which he was promoting, he replied indignantly, ‘Well, I think that’s quite enough don’t you?’  Isn’t it often underestimated what a writer must give to their work? The act of reading is simple enough; for the reader to forget or disregard the toil of effort involved in composing the story, I suppose is the mark of a novel well done.

Anyway, to my delight I came across this:

http://tinyurl.com/yhgrzv6

I cannot always be trusted to make the  right decisions when it comes to reading choice, for instance, the latest book was Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks. I cannot write about it without including the words ‘tedious, pompous, meticulous, Victorian’, scan the pages quicker and quicker until I reach the predictable end (well, that was an actaul sentence rather than just ‘words’) but more on that later.

For now, I just do this for fun:

 http://bit.ly/YFy2g

So it’s been a while and I conclude that I am not very good at this Blog thing. Will I get better? I feel I need a routine: on the morning train, a disciplined lunch time not spent on the ‘latte factor’ in Pret, a quiet contemplative moment whilst the BF is out on a Gin Friday…scratch a word out for every precious second.

Well there does have to be a point to it. Why do people Blog – is it a more sophisticated form of web-browsery intelligensia – it surpasses the bloated non-friend app fiend of Facebook; it bulks out the text-limited Twitterateri of Twitter. Usefully it draws together disparately found but commonly linked sources of intersting stuff (that is the bit that I don’t seem to be very good at). I think it is also to do with your work-a-day-week and if you can be trusted like a good employee to not abuse the generous  web user limitations imposed by your employer – yes, they do watch you!

Research is key. By the time I think deeply enough or feel compelled to Blog something, the moment has passed – the media moves with the speed of background noise on public transport, and the experience is as forgetable, though in some cases requires washing off, especially in the heat.

For instance, the Leona Lewis shock attack.  That was some time ago now and I remember thinking, ‘At last, someone speaks out  on crimes against literature’.  But sadly no, it’s just another  mental health story. Unchecked, the guy develops a delusional crush on the lovely Ms Lewis and punches her because he loves her…just like the premise of her ‘autobiography’, it’s a fairytale. So she sings nicely, but do we really need a book about it?

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/07/leona-lewis-autobiography

And as for ‘autobiography’, is it? Is it really? Isn’t it, like all the others of its ilk, a fat collection of photos and ghost written smultz along the well trodden path of rags to riches. I think there needs to be a new word for it.

Anyhow, a blog entry about nothing much, if only to make me feel better for having spoken out into the silent watchers of internet space.

This excellent article by Hugh McGuire at the Huffington Post http://bit.ly/rk2oH has informed me greatly about the future of self publishing, or what was once, and perhaps in some circles, somewhat archaically is still called Vanity publishing. It is food for thought and action.

Friday, hooray. The weeks have gone by with yet more excuses not to write, the latest is a house move which bleeds time and cleaning fluid in equal measures.  From this experience I add resource to a novel idea about people that hoard, because generally, when people hoard eventually there is only room left for grime, vermin and dark uninhabited corners, analogous to the protagonists’ mind perhaps.

So now that hideous experience over with I look forward to the sometimes weekly visit to the department of my favourite man that tells me stories! Some people can be quite giving with their conversation, some will just talk about the daily grind or complain about transport and the failure of the social services.  But others will draw on memory and experience (this is exponential with age I am sure…so if you want good material for stories/characters/plots etc, then go out and find yourself an old (er) person. My man, following a life changing experience, decided to up and leave Blighty to travel the world seeking out nature.  Every week there is a different story, and sometimes if I am lucky he will bring me a book to read. Combining two stories he has told me, one about what happens to dead bodies – casualties of war (first hand) and secondly the climate of Borneo, and how quickly things decompose in the tropics, have given me the critical scene in the novel upon which everything radiates from. So, it’s set in Borneo, and there is a dead body involved; oh and some beetles…

Of course, for the writer, inspiration, content, imagery, character can be taken from anywhere, anyone and any source. The favourite ploy of the night-school creative writing class is the magic bag of inspirational items! Dip in and see what you pull out: 3 things, now link them together and write 200 words: a pink-headed gonk, a postcard from Brighton, and a carrot – for example! I find these little exercises quite fun, but I have never been at a loss for a source for my writing so I never have used them as a tool, but I guess just knowing that you can write something is a mini exercise in keeping the writer’s block at bay.

Anyway, I am ever more convinced that I should be writing this second novel simply because of the stuff I encounter that somehow links intrinsically to the subject matter of the story. It’s like I am being given little signs by some divine muse; or, it’s like when you buy a new car/phone/dress/handbag whatever and then before you know it everyone has got the same; but it’s only because you’ve got what they’ve got that you notice!  So I guess, because I know my story, I am subconsciously attuned to look out for the props, and they really are piling up, faster than i can write them in to the plot, for sure.

So this weekend’s Guardian has an article by Julie Bindel about the people that through no fault of their own, happen to stumble across a dead body (or part there of). http://tinyurl.com/mggj4o

I have long been intrigued by this, it’s almost a macabre version of the scene from Austin Powers when one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen gets killed and the news is broken to his wife. No one cares about the body count, or that the body count has family! And so too the same applies to the people that the story isn’t about. They are almost facilitators, or as legal parlance has it, accessories to the fact. But the impact upon these people could be devastating.

In the novel, some one has to find the body, and what impact does it have on them? Does the person that finds the body go on to have a major part, or are they incidental; a plot devise to move the scene on? Did they expect to find the body (are they trained to?) and if they think they are prepared for what they might find, what do they ultimately think? I now have some questions upon which to build some character development (though who I don’t know yet), I have the dead body, but not the finder. This is the trouble with source material, it won’t come at you in the form and stucture your novel will take. It is a series of random occurences that have to be noted and stored for future reference.