Toby Litt's Blog, page 10

Writing and Shit – part 16 – Making your characters more sympathetic even if they are baddies

SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS

The following bit is really only for you if you want to write popular fiction – although, if you are aiming for something that sells less well you might be interested in discovering something about the dark arts.

I will have to flip over to discussing characters, because the phrase everyone uses is sympathetic central character (not central people).

Why do readers decide they like a particular character in a particular book? Or more accurately, why does each individual reader decide they like this person in this book?

Because for a person to be sympathetic, they need to be directly appealing to each individual reader.

I have thought about this a lot, and have come up with a very simple definition –

A sympathetic character is someone whose true worth is unknown to those around them, and to the world in general.

The easiest example, because he became so universally loved in such a short time, is Harry Potter – Harry Potter but not as the final victor against Voldemort, but Harry Potter as we first met him, living beneath the stairs in the awful house of the horrible Dursley family.

Harry Potter has just about everything going for him, in terms of immediately gaining the reader’s sympathy.

He is an orphan, badly treated, not granted his basic dignity, physically vulnerable. But this is to put it too abstractly.

Poor Harry – I mean, he’s a young boy, both his parents have been killed, his adopted family force him to live in a tiny space beneath the stairs, and he wears a pair of broken National Health Service glasses (like John Lennon did). When a letter comes that could lift him out of his mundane life, the Dursleys keep it from him.

Thwarted hopes, these are very important for sympathetic characters. The character is ever hopeful and ever disappointed. Usually, their hopes are thwarted not through their own action or inaction but simply because their true worth is unknown to those around them and to the world in general.

The more modest the hopes, the more sympathetic the character is likely to be. At the beginning of the novel, Harry doesn’t want to go to Hogwarts and become a boy wizard – because he knows nothing of that. He’s received an envelope addressed to him. All he wants to do is be able to open that enveloped and read whatever is inside it.

Literary aside: The literary novel Stoner by John Williams became a great success years after it was published and its writer died. Very little happens in the book, and we know that very little happens because we are told so directly in the first few pages. Yet for many people the book is a great reading experience, because Stoner is a sympathetic central character. Throughout his life, his true worth is unknown to those around him and to the world in general. But, even more than Stoner himself, the book’s recent success depends upon it also being seen as sympathetic – because on publication, and for years afterwards, its true literary worth was unknown. John Williams died in 1994, never to know the many readers his book would one day find, and move.

This all sounds very reasonable and nice. Almost everyone wishes to think of themselves as basically a nice person who would be liked by people, if they were to be known by them. Isn’t sympathy just nice people feeling positively toward other nice people?

No, I don’t think so.

LOOP THE LOOP

A deeply sympathetic character creates what I would call a sympathy loop within the reader, a loop of ever intensifying identification.

All of us feel, rightly, that our true worth is unknown to those around us and to the world in general. Even those lucky or unlucky folk who become world-famous, universally celebrated for their ability to do something (score goals, rap, make scientific discoveries, play chess) are likely to feel frustrated that people don’t really know what they’re capable of. And we don’t – how could we? There is not enough human attention around for every human to get the attention they deserve. Fame makes this imbalance more extreme. There are people who spend far more of their life concerned with the injustices inflicted upon Harry Potter, a fictional character who feels nothing, that with their own brother, sister, father or mother.

If we’re very lucky, we get the full attention of at least one loving adult when we are a baby – our tiniest achievement is applauded, praised, relayed to others within our hearing.

Not to receive your full amount of attention and love is unjust. We all feel unjustly neglected, and so we all respond to instances of injustice. The Dursleys are unjust to Harry. His colleagues and lovers are unjust to Stoner.

The sympathy loop for Harry Potter works like this –

The reader feels their true worth is unknown. They read about Harry and see that his true worth is unknown. Harry is like me, the reader thinks. I am like Harry. Already, within a few pages, the identification has been made. (The opening chapters of the Harry Potter books are where J.K.Rowling is at her most brilliant.) But the loop continues. The world, thinks the reader, confusing the real world and the fictional world, is an unfair, unjust place where true worth goes unknown. And they continue, But if I recognise the true worth of Harry Potter, I make the work a slightly better place – a place in which I myself am more likely to receive recognition for my true worth. The more I value Harry Potter, who is very much like me, the more I am likely to be valued.

LEARNING TO LOVE YOURSELF IS THE GREATEST LOVE OF ALL

What is really going on with sympathetic central characters – how could it be otherwise? – is that readers are finding a detour by which they can get back to themselves.

Readers find characters sympathetic because it gives them a chance to do a bit of disguised self-love.

I told you it was a dirty business.

For you, as a writer of stories, it is good to be aware of how this works.

In the most basic, practical way, you can rewrite characters to be more sympathetic. A very successful writer of popular fiction I know received some feedback from her editors. ‘The book’s great,’ the editor said. ‘But your central character isn’t very sympathetic.’ My friend told me her first thought was, ‘Oh, no – I’ve going to have to write the rescuing the kitten scene, again.’

The rescuing the kitten scene is the Save the Cat scene, popularized in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.

CAN SAVE THE CAT WORK

FOR EVEN THE MOST UNSYMPATHETIC CHARACTER?

 Let’s just imagine something entirely implausible, that you would never ever write.

A serial killer has just buried his latest victim, an innocent young woman. We see him wipe the dirt off his hands and spit on her grave. He gets in the car and sets off for the next town, in order to kill again. He is a large, brutish looking man with a scarred face. He stops for gas and, as he’s filling the tank in his pick-up, he hears a kitten mewling. He looks around and discovers it, somehow stuck down a storm drain at the edge of the busy highway. At great risk to himself, the serial killer lifts the cover, reaches down into the drain and picks up the kitten who immediately bites his hand. The serial killer winces and drops the kitten, who falls down, unhurt on the tarmac. But it’s right in the path of a huge oncoming truck. The serial killer grabs the kitten and steps out of the road – the truck missing him by millimetres. The serial killer then replaces the storm drain and carries the mewling kitten back toward his truck. Just then, a little girl – who has seen none of his actions – comes out of the garage and rushes up to him. ‘Hey, mister,’ she screams, ‘are you stealing my kitten?’

‘No, here it is – have it,’ he says.

‘You were stealing my kitten!’ wails the little girl, drawing the attention of her burly father and uncles, who work in the machine shop. When they start to draw in, several even more burly bikers walk over, too.

‘Were you stealing my daughter’s kitten?’ the father asks, tire wrench in hand.

‘No! No!’ says the serial killer. ‘It was in the storm drain. I just rescued it.’

What are you feeling for the serial killer, right now?

How is that possible?

You never have to write Save the Cat, but you may find a subtle variation on it useful. If your character is prepared to do something nice for another character, with no hope of reward, they will go up in our estimation. If they are caught doing something nice but refuse to take any credit for it, or insist on passing that credit to someone else, we will like them even more.

Self-sacrifice is perhaps the most endearing quality of all. You’ll note that Harry Potter does it all the time.

One further word, it can make a character less sympathetic if they have chosen the circumstances in which they find themselves.

More in a bit.

Writing and Shit – part 15 – Fingernails and Dancing Queens and Better Characters

We’re now going to look at some ways you can work on making the people you write about feel real and, if it’s what you need, likeable.

PEOPLE?

It might be easier to start referring to them as characters, but I’m going to stick with people, so as to keep them on the same level as things (rather than props, clues, McGuffins, symbols) and places (rather than locations, settings, backgrounds, symbols).

I’d like briefly to say a few things about what makes a person believable, on the page, and then give you some practical ways to go about achieving this.

Real people – we feel we know them, often we know in detail what they like and what they dislike, we know what they are like. We feel that most of the time we can say fairly accurately how they are going to behave in a particular situation.

However, real people often surprise us. They go beyond or fall beneath what we expected of them.

Philip Roth said it brilliantly in American Pastoral –

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

The same should be true of people in stories. As readers, we should feel that we know them but also feel they may go beyond or fall beneath what we expect of them. We should be able to get them wrong and wrong and wrong.

In other words, and here is my definition, people in fiction should be capable of believable self-contradiction.

We should be able to read them two main ways – forwards and backwards. Reading forwards, for the first time, we should get to a moment where they make a decision or act in a certain way, and we should be surprised. Oh really, we should think. I didn’t expect them to do that. (That’s the self-contradiction part.) But then, reading backwards, when we’ve come to the end of the book, or perhaps just passed on to the next chapter, we should think, Oh, yes, of course that’s what they’d do. (That’s the believable part.)

This, I feel, is how we think about the people we know.

In trying to achieve this capacity for being believably self-contradictory, in people we’re writing about, we need to make sure that they aren’t fitted together too neatly. Not everything we learn about them (and this is very important) needs to be a confirmation of what we already know about them. At least one contradiction, but perhaps many more than one, needs to stick out.

Exercise: Have a person you have written about be at a wedding reception.

Explanation: I’d like you to think of a person you have written about before. It might be useful for them to be from a novel or story set in the contemporary world, but if you can time-travel them – with all their braveries and terrors – from a previous era, that’s fine, too. Because we are going to put them in a very particular situation, and then we are going to see what they do.

Here’s the set-up – a wedding has taken place. The bride and groom have been married. Food has been served and eaten. Alcohol, too, may have been consumed. The day has progressed and now, in a nearby room, dancing is to take place. But no-one, yet, has started to dance. Your person has finished eating but is sitting, alone or in company, talking or silent, in a room that isn’t the room where the dancing is about to being. But whoever is in charge of the music decides now is the time. They put on a song to which everyone normally dances, a guaranteed floor-filler. (I often suggest ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen.) The question is, how does your person react to this moment? Start with the words, ‘The music sounded out loudly, and…’ Insert your person’s name, then write eight or nine sentences describing exactly how they behave, until it’s clear – from their reaction – what your person is like.

Great. Was that fun? I hope so.

Another exercise: Immediately – before taking a break or thinking of anything else – write a single sentence describing what your person’s fingernails are like. How long? In what condition? False, varnished, whatever.

Very good.

Exercise: Now one more thing – your person’s fingernails smell of something. Write down what they smell of.

(They smell of fingernails is not an acceptable sentence, Mr But.)

WHAT HAVE WE DONE AND WHERE ARE WE?

You have now written about your person using the two main techniques writers use to describe a character – to do characterisation.

The first, the dancing or not dancing, is ACTION.

The second, the fingernails, is DESCRIPTION.

ACTION is a description of what a person DOES, DETAIL is a description of what a person IS.

A third way, which we are leaving out, is direct telling. This is a more clumsy but also more definite way of giving a person to the reader. It may, in certain circumstances, in certain kinds of writing, be the best way to make the reader feel they know a person. However, for the moment, we are going to avoid telling because it’s a kind of defeat. Why waste a sentence telling us, ‘So-and-so was timid and nervous’ when you can have more fun, and give more fun, by showing exactly how that timidity and nervousness play out in the moment.

When I do this exercise in class, we play this as a game. Hopefully there are enough students to do it both ways.

First, I get one student to read out their ACTION. The music came on, how did their person react?

Then I get everyone in the class to describe exactly the details of that person’s fingernails – as they imagine them.

How do the two things we know about the person fit together, or not fit together?

If, for example, the person doesn’t dance, but stays at the table or heads straight to the bar to get another drink, does that mean the details of their fingernails are untidy, bitten down?

This would logically be the kind of person who, if directly telling was being used, would be described as timid and nervous.

I ask the student who wrote that person’s reaction to the music to read out their definitive fingernail DETAIL. Did the other students guess right?

Now we go the other way. Starting only from the fingernail DETAIL of a person, everyone in the class is asked to say exactly how they act in the music moment.

Let’s say, to change things around a little, this person’s fingernails are long, false, new, rainbow-coloured and glittery. What do you think the person with those nails does when the dance music starts?

Once we’ve gone round everyone, we return to the student who gave us the person’s nails and ask them to definitively tell us how that person acts.

How did we do? Did the other students get close?

FINGERNAILS AND DANCING OR NOT DANCING

How do you give your person depth? I’m going to answer this question very directly: You give them depth by making sure that the ACTIONS they perform aren’t simply confirmed by every DETAIL about them and, vice versa, that every DETAIL of their appearance, dress, speech and so on doesn’t simply provide a neat clue to the ACTIONS they will carry out.

Say we have a person of whom we might say they are timid and nervous. And say we give the DETAIL of their fingernails as ‘bitten right to the quick’. And say we describe them in the music-moment as ‘shrinking further into their chair, as if they wanted to disappear’.

Fine, they are consistent, as a person – we entirely get them. We could anticipate how they might behave in different circumstances.

But – and this is one of the biggest buts so far (and it’s mine, not yours, Mr But) – but in giving them to the reader we have done absolutely no storytelling.

What holds for stories holds also for people in stories.

A story is about something or someone in the wrong place.

Mr, Mrs or Ms Nervous-Bitten-Fingernails-Non-Dancer is a person for whom everything is in place. There is a story happening because, for them, a wedding reception is very much the wrong place.

But their story isn’t a very interesting or deep one. What we have is DETAIL confirming ACTION, ACTION confirming DETAIL, and no gaps.

Stories happen in the gaps opened by they storyteller.

Great storytelling, very often, is about the creation of satisfying gaps.

When you create a gap, the reader will fill it in for you.

Let’s change one thing about our Mr, Mrs or Ms Nervous – let’s change their fingernails.

Instead of ‘bitten right to the quick’ we are giving them these beauties – ‘long, false, new, rainbow coloured and glittery’.

Still, when the music-moment happens, this person is described as ‘shrinking further into their chair, as if they wanted to disappear’.

Can you feel the difference? Isn’t a gap created here into which a universe of story can expand?

As soon as we get glittery fingernails as DETAIL alongside not-dancing as ACTION, we include time in our characterisation. And time is depth.

This new person, nervous with glittery fingernails, is given to us at two moments – the moment at which they had their flamboyant nails done (they look new, so perhaps the day before) and the moment at which they would be expected to bring that flamboyance out.

What might have happened to them, in between those two moments, to explain their action – or their non-action?

A story. Something worth telling.

Something, perhaps, has gone wrong for them, and something has probably – or is about to – go  more wrong.

By changing that single detail about them, and having it not merely confirm how they behaved, we created a deeper, more intriguing and – I’d say – also more likeable person.

If we, just for a moment, try to imagine how they will behave for the rest of the wedding reception, it’s clear that they are a much more exciting, less predictable person then Mr, Mrs or Ms Nervous-Bitten-Fingernails-Not-Dancing.

(You can also do the other reversal, and have the person with terribly bitten fingernails flamboyantly taking to the dance floor. Such an interesting gap there.)

What if we wanted the reader to find this person really sympathetic. How could we make absolutely sure of that?

We will cover that in a short while.

Writing and Shit – part 14 – Are you writing a story or a tale?

STORIES VS TALES

Warning: The picture I am about to draw is in crayon rather than in single hair brushstrokes. However, the overall picture is the important thing, and even more so where you appear in it. (And Mr But will have plenty of opportunities to speak up.)

When I say ‘story’, in this context, I mean ‘short story’.

AHEM

Tales are older than short stories. If you look back to some of our earliest texts, you can find tales – there are tales in the Bible. The tale of Jonah and the whale, for example. There are tales upon tales in Homer. Every culture has its folk tales. Some anthologies of short stories, wishing to go a long way into the past, include episodes from the Mahabarata or the Kalevala. Australian aboriginals and Native Americans had tales – they did not have short stories.

Short stories have a much shorter history. The most significant figure in the form was the Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). He wrote what are recognisably modern short stories. By modern I mean, right now, that they could be submitted to a magazine today without seeming entirely weird or outdated. There are other, earlier, writers:

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)

Henry James (1843-1916)

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

All are important; all should be tracked down and read. (Henry James is my favourite.)

SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TALES AND STORIES

A tale is likely to be quite brief. The people in it will make decisions based on practical concerns (I need something to eat, I need to kill the monster) rather than psychological complexities.

Tales have morals, short stories don’t.

Tales have simple characters who may be limited to one or two distinguishing features – the youngest son, brave.

The easiest way to tell a tale and a story apart is simply to tell them – tell them to a friend in a bar, or on a train journey.

A tale, like a joke or a good anecdote, is easy to transport. A short story is far more stuck on the page.

If I begin with Once upon a time… and tell my sons the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, complete with path, flowers, Big Bad Wolf, Granny, big eyes, ears and teeth, and Huntsman with axe, I have – as much as is possible – told Little Red Riding Hood. I haven’t told a particular version, but my sons can’t turn round to me and say, You didn’t tell us Little Red Riding Hood.

If I memorise – in Russian – Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’, and recite it mostly accurately but miss out a single sentence from towards the end, I have not told ‘Lady with a Little Dog’.

JOINING IN WITH THE CHORUS

One of the most crucial moments, for making a distinction between tales and stories, comes at the climax of Little Red Riding Hood. When Little Red Riding Hood is standing at the end of the bed, looking at the Wolf who has eaten her Granny, she says, What big eyes you have!

And the Wolf, and the children listening, and most likely the adults too – everyone choruses along –

All the better to see you with.

This happens again with All the better to hear you with! And even more with ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH!

In the short story, there is no equivalent of this joining in on the chorus. The idea that a character would speak in this rhythm, doing three rounds of call and response, is anathema to the short story. It’s not naturalistic. Fairy-tales are dominated by threes. Short story writers, if they discovered this tendency to triplicate within a story, would do their best to disrupt or disguise it. They wouldn’t want to get caught out having unwittingly written a tale.

There are many successful contemporary writers who, essentially, write long tales. One example would be Neil Gaiman. He is very open about having been influenced by writers such as Kipling and Saki – writers who weren’t averse to the tale-like good story, climaxing in a final twist, and leaving the reader with a moral.

You are unlikely to finish a Neil Gaiman story and find yourself asking the questions, What just happened there? or, even more so, Did anything just happen there?

A short story version of my earlier example ‘The Party’ would quite possibly end with an equivalent of the sentence, ‘Trevor continued to look at the tree in his back garden.’ The writing may try to be finer than this, ‘As Trevor looked out, the leaves shivered in the breeze.’ Essentially, the writer is saying to the reader, Now, over to you. It’s up to you to get to the bottom of this one. You’re on your own.

Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a famous example of a short story in which very little seems to happen. Once you pay properly close attention, you realise that you are witnessing a great, merciless battle between a man and a woman. Once, also, you realise that short stories – by only writing about the small bit of time they write about – leave it to stand for the rest of the people’s lives, you see that this conversation in a minor railway station in the middle of nowhere is genuinely hellish. Neither the man nor the woman can expect any real happiness for one another, or from life. There is very little action, lots of dialogue, but the reader gets everything they need. However, they have to work for it in a way a tale would never expect them to.

Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman who were very unhappy. The woman was pregnant with the man’s child, but the man did not want her to have the baby.

That makes for a great short story but a poor tale.

AND SO?

This distinction I have made between stories and tales is very important because you must not slip in an uncontrolled way between writing a story and writing a tale. It will undermine what you’re trying to do both in terms of being real and having meaning.

If you tie bows, and finish off every story with a neat moral, you will never be taken all that seriously as a writer. You won’t get published in the New Yorker.

There will be many other websites and magazines open to you. You may achieve a vast audience. But you will have chosen to take sides… You will be seen as doing something rather old-fashioned, and dealing in moral certainties that are no longer available to us.

Literary aside: About what you do, you have a choice; about the cultural context in which you do it, you’re a little lamb lost in the deep dark woods.

As I’ve said, a tale is what people would call a good story. It is likely to have obvious twists that the listener or reader will see coming.

Most of all, a tale will tend to suggest a fairly simply moral. The moral of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is When your parents tell you not to step off the path, don’t step off the path.

More simply put, Obey authority, obey rules.

Mr But: If you were really straining, though, you might force a moral out of Chekhov’s ‘Lady With a Little Dog’. Something like Don’t start a holiday romance with anyone unless you are prepared to divorce your partner and marry your new lover. Or, Don’t flirt with people, you may end up having to marry them.

I’ll grant you that. But you are really straining.

More recent short stories, particularly of the sort called epiphany stories, contain even less that could be retold in a bar. At the conclusion, if they made it that far, the listener would most likely say, But nothing really happened.

The history of the development of the short story is a movement further and further away from the tale. And what counts, in the tale, as something happening has generally been left behind. It is not enough, in a tale, for a character to realise they have something they need to realise, they just don’t yet know what it is. Yet this could easily make the basis of a short story.

Short stories have redefined what it is that counts as an event, as something happening. James Joyce’s stories in Dubliners are often about bafflement, hesitation, wimping out. Characters are taken to the brink of defining themselves through an act, then back away – and so define themselves through that retreat.

It was Chekhov who said, ‘If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’

This has become known as Chekhov’s gun. But many contemporary short story writers would find the fictional firing of the gun, lethally or non-lethally, far too crass. Their story would allow the gun to hang there, unfired, and would turn out to be about inner, psychological violence.

The short story is an art form. It is a written form, one that can be read aloud but which begins on the page. It relies upon very accurate retransmission – through anthologies, books, web pages. It can be performed but the performance isn’t the story; the story is only the particular sequence of words on the page.

If you have a look at Virginia Woolf’s stories (‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’) or, more recently, Claire-Louise Bennett (in the collection POND), you’ll see that they contain nothing like the ordered events of a tale. They’re far more like waking up to find yourself inside someone’s wandering mind.

Exercise: Ask yourself. Honestly. Do you find yourself writing short stories or tales? Look back at the definitions.

Quite often, stories by writers – and I am including novels – begin as short stories. They are realistic, in that the details of the person’s life show they live in a world governed by the laws of physics but subject to chance. The person has minor, seemingly irrelevant details about them – details of appearance or behaviour – that we are given but that don’t play a clear part in the working out of the story. They aren’t merely the third son, ambitious. They have grey eyebrows, slightly peaked, and the left one is higher than the right.

But as the actions follow one another, and the writer starts to worry that the mere describing of the actions – in the order they happen – isn’t enough, stories often turn into tales. While quest for a satisfying final sentence, the writer begins to shape a moral. In the first version of ‘The Party’, Trevor started as fairly realistic but ended up being the example of a tale-style moral, Don’t get above your station.

One thing I’ve just said is that people who appear in tales tend to be much simpler and less psychologically deep than people who appear in short stories – and even more so, in novels.

Exercise: Look back at your story start. Is it a story start or is it desperate to turn into a tale? How could you change it so that it was definitely a short story?

9 Things You Need to Write a Novel (2019)

 

The first thing you need to write a novel is… Time.

The second thing you need to write a novel is… More Time.

And the third thing you need to write a novel is… Even More Time.

This perhaps seems a bit obvious. But let me explain.

Time, More Time and Even More Time are all necessary.

I’ve divided Time up into three because you need Time for different things.

The first lot of Time is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Time to write. Time to sit at the desk with words coming out of you.

The second lot of time, More Time, is… Time not to write. Time to do stuff which doesn’t seem to be writing but which, in the end, turns out to have been writing all along. To the uninitiated, this may appear to be people-watching or going for a walk up a hill, taking a nice long nap, or listening very closely to a piece of music – but, actually, it is when the writing bit of the brain does its hardest work. Believe me.

The third lot of time, Even More Time, is Time to rewrite, and rewrite and rewrite. But we’re not going to worry about that now. That’s for later drafts. For the moment, we’re thinking about the first draft.

As I’m sure you know, Time is never a neutral, abstract thing. Nor merely a clock-ticking-on-the-mantlepiece thing. Time for writing your novel is time not for other occupations, not for other people. It’s time stolen from your loved ones; time they will probably resent you not devoting to them. Time is closing the door behind you and not answering when people knock – not unless they knock very hard, and shout words like ‘Fire’ and ‘Bastard’ and ‘I’m leaving – I really am’.

In a way, writing is saying to your loved ones, ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you’. Meaning, I want to talk to you in a more articulate and truthful way than I ever could if you were there in front of me. ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you.’

All of which explains why you’ll need the fourth thing, which is…

Some Selfishness

I could try to make this sound nicer – I could call it self-belief or determination or following your dream – but that’s not how it’s likely to appear to your loved ones, the ones outside the door, knocking, pleading.

Self-belief without justification is always going to appear selfish, and until you write your novel there won’t be any justification. In lots of people’s eyes, until your novel is published by a publisher they have heard of, and appears in shops they frequent, and is reviewed in a newspaper they read, then it will continue to be unjustified. And in the eyes of a large minority, a book still isn’t really justified until it has been made into a film starring an actor or actress they have heard of – thus saving them the trouble of having to read it.

However, writing rarely has a proper justification. Not in the strictest sense. Writing with justification is the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

There is a story about James Joyce, made up by Tom Stoppard and included in his play Travesties. Joyce is in the dock. The interrogator asks him, ‘What did you do during the Great War?’ To which Joyce replies, ‘I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?’

The only real justification for a piece of writing is that it is worth other people reading – or feeling guilty about not having read.

But Selfishness is, of course, not enough. You will also need…

Some Generosity

Because, without making it sound like running a coffee morning for Macmillan, writing is an act of generosity. A novel that isn’t essentially for other people to read isn’t worth writing.

This is the ‘..I want to talk to you’ part, the part that comes after ‘Go away.’

Many writers claim they write only to please themselves. And I believe them – but only so far as to say this is what they need to tell themselves in order to write.

A well-formed sentence has a direction: towards the reader. It arrows.

So far we have: Time, More Time, Even More Time, Some Selfishness and Some Generosity.

The next thing you need is a little more prosaic. It’s…

The Means

By The Means I mean the physical necessities of writing – a pen or pencil and some paper, or a computer.

What you use is entirely your choice. If what works for you is to write in crayon on old cornflake packets or in chalk on the corner shop wall, it doesn’t really matter.

There are some drawbacks to the corner shop wall (though with instagram poetry, who knows?). And I have a few cautionary things to say about word-processing.

The first is that it can make writing seem too easy. Although I am telling you the nine things you need to write a novel, the most important is probably contained in these five words: There are no short cuts.

The sheer physical labour of rewriting a novel, start to end, by hand, would certainly make one consider the necessity of every single word; copy/paste does not do this.

Of the Evils of Word-Processing, copy/paste is Number 2. (Number 1 comes a little later. Read on.)

By Means I also mean a workplace. Ideally this would be, as Virginia Woolf put it, A Room of One’s Own. But if this isn’t, a café, library, church, or park bench in spring or summer will do almost as well. Quiet, too, is probably recommended.

I realise for some people even this is hard to attain. In which case, I’d suggest you write poems or flash fiction – for the moment. Until you can sneak away for longer.

The next thing you need – there are only three more – is something much more abstract. It is…

A Discipline.

A Discipline. Not I repeat not a routine, though it might on the surface resemble one.

A routine is unhelpful because, when you miss it or mess it up, you are going to feel bad, and get disheartened, and stop writing.

I think the idea of a discipline is better than that of a routine, because it is more flexible.

A routine is ‘I need to be at my desk by nine o’clock and produce 400 words by lunchtime.’ A discipline is, ‘It would be nice if I could do about a page or so every day.’

Here are a couple of famous writers’ disciplines. They are American writers. I’m not sure why but American writers seem to be more open about the craft of what they do. Perhaps because they feel awkward when anyone emphasises the art aspect.

The first discipline is Ernest Hemingway’s:

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

This comes from his book A Moveable Feast – a memoir of Paris in the 1920s. It is perhaps the single most useful clue I have ever come across as to how novels get written.

The second discipline is from David Mamet’s A Whore’s Profession. Mamet is a notable dramatist, and also wrote the screenplay to Wag the Dog.

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, ‘Today, I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.’ And then, the following day to say, ‘Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and all I have to do is be a little bit inventive,’ et cetera, et cetera.

American writers, particularly male American writers, can often go to extremes when they set their minds to a routine. Hemingway, later in his life, became very macho about things.

He wrote standing up, usually in his bedroom in his house in Cuba, using the top of a bookcase, on which room was cleared, to quote the Paris Review, “for a typewriter, a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east windows.” It gets better. Hemingway “stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a Lesser Kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.” He told his interviewer, George Plimpton, that he began in pencil, then shifted to his typewriter when his writing was going extremely well or when he wrote dialogue. Each day he kept count of the words he produced: “from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so be won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.” Hemingway was a strange old man, as he himself might have put it, but, when it came to writing, no stranger than most.

Not to be outdone, here is John Steinbeck:

He wrote eight hours a day, six days a week for forty years. He would sharpen twenty-four pencils each morning and write with them until each one was blunt. After many years of this regimen, he had to use his left hand to insert the pencil into the calluses on his writing hand because he was unable to pick up the writing utensil with his right hand. Every few months, he would sandpaper those calluses so he could continue to write.

British writers are different. Ian McEwan, I heard, rewards himself with a Choco Leibnitz biscuit if he’s had a good morning.

I’m not asking you to sandpaper your calluses. But I might be able to give you a few hints about finding a good, productive discipline:

To start with, don’t count the hours (a person can easily achieve nothing in eight hours), but do have a set amount you must do before you finish: one page, two, more, of hand- or typewritten words.

I said that I’d come back to the Number 1 evil of Word-Processing. It is wordcount. Especially Live Wordcount always in view.

Wordcount is an instrument of the Devil.

Don’t use it more than once a week.

Count pages, not words. A page of dialogue shouldn’t count for less than a page of description.

A few other suggestions:

If it’s a choice between writing badly and not writing at all, write badly. Your only responsibility is for the final draft.

Don’t try to make it perfect on the first draft. Roughness is a virtue at this stage, because roughness is easier to cut, to rewrite.

The penultimate thing you need is the one you’ll probably have thought of first…

A Yearning.

I’ve chosen this, rather than Idea. There’s nothing more likely to close you down than someone saying, ‘You have to have an idea. Now.’

But you need to have a strong sense that there’s something not quite there that should be.

A nagging sensation. A question. Okay, I give up – an Idea.

What does an Idea look/feel/smell/taste/sound like?

Well, you tell me.

But if it’s a really good one, it’s quite possible that, even if you told it me, I wouldn’t recognise it as an Idea – and certainly not as a really good one.

I would, incidentally, recommend that you don’t ever tell people your ideas. Because unless they say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Let me sell my house to finance you as you complete this great work,’ you are likely to be disappointed with their reaction. And this may put you off seeing the idea through to its end.

The problem of The Idea is the biggest one for writers just starting out. They return again and again to the question: What do I write? And this is, of course, the question I am least able to answer for you.

But the one thing I won’t repeat is the Great Wisdom of creative writing classes, i.e., Write What You Know.

This is likely to make you think not of what you Know but what you’re Completely Bloody Sick to Death of.

Henry James, my favourite writer, had something neat to say about the relationship between writing and knowing, expression and experience, in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’:

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consist of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’

This is a much more difficult, and useful, thing to aim for. If you aspire to being one of those on whom nothing is lost, then ideas will come to you, I promise.

An idea can be an area of mess or confusion in your head, or a line of remembered real-life dialogue, or an enticing title, or an exquisite memory, or a feeling of dreadful foreboding. It’s something, in other words, that haunts you.

A Yearning.

The final thing you need is…

A Tone

For the first-time novelist, consistency of voice is one the hardest things to achieve. You probably won’t, to begin with, have anything approaching a style, but you will have to settle upon a tone. This can range from ‘Once upon a time…’ to ‘For a long time, my mother used to…’

Here, though, is the ultimate and very simple secret of writing a novel:

If you write 1,000 words a day for 75 days, at the end of those 75 days you will have a novel-length-thing. This novel-length-thing may not be a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a novel, but it’s a lot closer to being all three than the nothing you had before.

Or as Gertrude Stein said, ‘The way to do it is to do it.’

So, to conclude, let us go through the 9 things you need to write a novel:

1. Time

2. More Time

3. Even More Time

4. Some Selfishness

5. Some Generosity

6. The Means

7. A Discipline

8. A Yearning

9. A Tone

You have no more excuses. If it’s in you, it can now come out.

Let it.

And if you’re after more tips on Starting to Write, you can find some here.

Ciaran Carson and Davy Graham

Ciaran Carson, the Belfast poet, died earlier this week.

I knew him a little bit, and admired him immensely.

The one time I went to dinner at his house, he was editing The Yellow Nib, a literary magazine. As we ate, we talked about music. He was a professional – could pick up a penny whistle and make you want to caper. I confessed to playing guitar, not very well. He challenged me to write it up – what I’d been saying about trying and failing to get better at playing tunes. I think the deadline he gave me was two weeks.

This is what I wrote:

I’ve been giving up guitar since the age of eleven and a half – because I couldn’t play like John Williams on CBS Records Presents John Williams or Dave Gilmour on Wish You Were Here or Django Reinhardt on anything he recorded or, for the past year, because I can’t play like Davy Graham on the CD reissue of Folk, Blues and Beyond (1964).

The most famous song on this album is ‘Angi’. It has been covered by a million bedroom guitarists, and also by Davy Graham’s contemporaries, Bert Jansch (as ‘Angie’) and Paul Simon (as ‘Anji’). And I’d like to write here about not being able to play ‘Angi’ (or ‘Angie’ or ‘Anji’).

It starts as casually as any recorded sound I know. The first notes, not as fully fretted as the later ones, are merely an out-breath – and the listener, travelling imaginatively back in time to the moment before the tape started rolling, knows there was an in-breath and an out-breath before that. In fact, what is implied, by these few seconds of chime, is a whole casual-disciplined existence – Davy Graham’s existence.

After strolling in so lightly, ‘Angi’ continues for four foursquare bars. During this introduction, it has already achieved an unprecedented balance; it is absolutely rigid and, at the same time, it is flowing. This is an impossible architecture of molten steel. (The strings of Davy Graham’s Gibson guitar would have been made of steel, although the three bass ones might have been copperwound.)

What has been established, on the most basic level, during these thirteen seconds, is the thing that always separates competent musicians from incompetent: the ability to accompany oneself – to play two lines at once.

On the BBC programme Folk Britannia, Graham mentions how he tried for ten years to learn the Arab lute, the Oud, but never quite mastered the ‘question and answer, antiphonal responses between treble and bass’. That may be true. But there is definitely a dialogue going on here.

The bassline of ‘Angi’ is a very simple descending figure, and Davy Graham’s statement of it is brutally direct. You’ll be familiar with the plonk-plonk-kerplonk-plonk from some of its later incarnations. It’s there, doubled up, as the first hook of The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’. It’s the basis of ‘Stray Cat Strut’ by The Stray Cats – which took ‘Angi’ across into a world of cartoon rockabilly. (Hard not to imagine T.C. growling it out to Officer Dibble.) Madness played around with it on the chorus of ‘It must be love’, taking it down to the deadness of the bottom note, and then resurrecting it with duh-duhhr! The Cure jazzed it up for ‘The Love Cats’. I can even hear it lurking around behind Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’.

Where it came from, in the first place, is probably some unrecorded jazz jam. Somehow, it seems as eternal as the three chord climb of ‘La Bamba’. (In fact, now I think of it, it’s pretty close to ‘La Bamba’ played backwards.) Wikipedia, however, credits Percy Mayfield’s ‘Hit the Road, Jack’. But maybe you could go further back, a lot further, and discover it buried in the Liebestod of Tristan und Isolde.

Plonk-plonk-kerplonk-plonk. Why is this riff so popular? Partly because it sounds so utterly right, and partly because, when you pick up a guitar, the opening notes to ‘Angi’ will fall under your fingers. In Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald observes how John Lennon’s style of composition was very much dependent on his indolent fingers. Songs like ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘I’m so tired’ enact their semi-stasis on the guitar neck where they came into existence, basing themselves around minimal movements – a C-chord to an F, a hammer-on, a note missed out. This laziness doesn’t hold for ‘Angi’, or not for long, because as soon as he’s set up the attainable, Davy Graham begins to mess with your sense of the finger-possible.

As a basic rule, the thicker your guitar strings (technically, the heavier their gauge), the harder they will be to play, and the purer, more ringingly, they will sound. Nick Drake has a reputation for effeteness. But, going by his dexterity on ‘Three Hours’ or ‘Time Has Told Me’ or ‘Road’, he could easily have crushed your skull with his left hand. Thicker guitar stings vibrate more powerfully, so, in order to get a clean note out of them, you have to press them down harder on the fretboard. Harder still than this is to bend the stings, and keep the note ringing out rather than fuzzing up. In the second four bars of ‘Angi’, Davy Graham pulls off something that, to a non-guitarist, doesn’t sound like much: he begins to bend lead-line notes on top of his downwardly clumping bass. What the guitarist knows, and marvels at, and is terrified by, is that Graham’s left hand is at the bottom of the guitar’s neck (though there’s actually a capo involved, moving all this action up to the fourth fret). Here, on the first three frets, is where most strumming-type guitarists (out of Dylan by Young) play their tunes. If they ever attempt to bend a note, they will move their hands halfway up the neck – where it is much much easier to push the string far enough to bend the note a tone or semi-tone. Davy bends notes which he shouldn’t be able to bend, at least not with such insulting ease. To a guitarist, these second four bars say one thing: ‘Fuck off – I’m better than you are.’

Behind most if not all twentieth century note-bending is Louis Armstrong, who took the practise from New Orleans and spread it across the world. And Davy Graham’s syncopated slurs in ‘Angi’ are a years-later tribute to the kind of sliding soundworld Armstrong perfected in ‘West End Blues’ and other epochal sides. This is the Blues part of Folk, Blues and Beyond, though it might as accurately have been Folk, Jazz. The pleasure in jazz is rarely in the centre of the notes but on their fraying margins. Think of the sad crack in Mile’s Davis tone, or the sanctified hoarseness of John Coltrane, or even the going-out-of-tune boom of Thelonius Monk’s straight-finger-struck piano. The tone of a guitar string changes when notes are played bent. That’s why Jimi Hendrix sounds as he does – so many of his notes are struck when the string is stretched, two, three, four notes higher than if the string were just fretted. ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)‘ – or, if not bent up one or two notes, they are played with vibrato, the rapid bending of the string. (Eric Clapton learnt to do this – or learnt to avoid not doing this. Play your guitar too straight and everything starts sounding like ‘Greensleeves’. The blues always goes at notes sideways.) Hendrix’s playing becomes increasingly more anguished. This is what most lead guitarists do: Push your fingers up to make the string tighter, it cries, let it loose from this position, it sobs.

What is even more astonishing about Graham’s playing is that the notes underlying the bent note remain unaffected. As you bend a string, it gets closer to the string beside it – and, simultaneously, harder to keep that note held decently down. But you’ll never hear a badly sounded note on Folk, Blues and Beyond. Graham sounds like he’s playing Plato’s guitar.

After this piece of disguised virtuosity, a coded message to all guitarists listening, Graham returns to another three very straight bars of his opening theme – though he finishes these off with a bluesy solo on the higher strings. He’s beginning to play with the constraints of the form. The regularity of the bass-pulse continues, though. If this were electronic music, it would be called ‘motorik’. The discipline involved is inexpressible. This is Man Machine Music.

But, to a guitarist of my level or above, ‘Angi’ seems just about do-able. The opening downward plod holds out the hope that you might, after a couple of weeks practise, be able to cobble together your own version of this tune. In the 1960s, you didn’t exist as a folk guitarist until you were able to play ‘Angi’. It was your ticket into the session, onto the stage; it was your introduction to young ladies with long hair and atrociously thick knitwear. In order to do this, to get your version, you would have to jettison all but the basic structure of the song. Those high-up solo flourishes, they would be first to go. What you’d be left with is a dogged bash through something recognisable. In other words, a travesty.

‘Angi’ is still a rite of passage. Just type it in to YouTube and you’ll find several dozen virtuosi having a go.

None of them even comes close to Davy Graham. With every one, you can tell that they are playing the tune just to prove that they can play the tune. Their eyes fix on their hands, willing them not to make a mistake. And almost all of them take it too fast – as if, simply by speeding things up, they could show they were better than Graham.

The versions by Bert Jansch and Paul Simon are both painful, in different ways. Jansch wants to sound rougher than Graham. His rhythm isn’t as secure. Graham is an immaculate troubadour – someone fit to appear before the ladies of the court; Jansch is his Boho cousin, entertaining the marketplace. Paul Simon just wants to show that he’s a good enough guitarist to get from one end of the damn thing to the other. There is no musicality on display, just the kind of sleepwalking fingering that comes from months of repetitions. It constantly pushes to speed up. The end isn’t a fulfilment, it’s the finishing line; and the relief in the final jazzy chord is wince-making. Did it! No, you didn’t.

And here is where I’d like to bring in another song from Folk, Blues and Beyond. It is Graham’s transcendent version of ‘She Moves Through the Fair’.

To amateur guitarists like myself, this tune is a lot kinder than ‘Angi’, because it puts us out of our misery almost immediately. From the very first notes, it is clear that Davy’s guitar is tuned in some weird modal way that would take you months to figure out. Then he’s playing an entirely idiosyncratic mix of Celtic air, Delta Blues, Indian raga, Moroccan trance music and Bluegrass fingerstyle. This is very much the Beyond of Folk, Blues and Beyond. And what it is beyond is everything. Here is Carolan jamming with the Muezzin. Here is a musician as at home in the souk as in County Down. Davy Graham becomes a one-man Afro Celt Sound System. This is where the sitar on ‘Paint it Black’ comes from. But play Brian Jones’s one-string twangings after Graham’s spangle-making and you know who was the real genius. Similarly with The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’ and The Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’. Jimmy Page’s rip-offs of Davy Graham (‘No “Stairway”. Denied!’) are rightly notorious.

With Davy Graham’s ‘She Moves Through the Fair’, the guitarist is left no choice – either you play it exactly as he did, note-for-note, which would be an exercise in imitative virtuosity, or you give up completely, accepting that your only way to challenge Graham would be to come up with a guitar style as innovative, achieved and sublime. And that is impossible. Graham’s playing is imperialistic – it is the pink on the map of World Music. He is a Rough Guide to the strength of strings. You want to go exploring? Find some obscure place no-one’s ever been. Well, Davy’s lived there for three months. He can show you the best bars, the best brothels, and the best temples, also.

Where ‘Angi’ makes me pick the guitar up again, ‘She Moves Through the Fair’ makes me abandon it. I will never achieve anything like this in music. Far better for me to try and do it in words.

One thing remains puzzling. ‘Angi’ was supposedly written in tribute to Davy Graham’s girlfriend. But as a portrait of a young woman with a Bohemianly-spelt name (Davy himself now insists on ‘Davey’), ‘Angi’ is a complete failure. Nothing built of flesh and blood ever sounded like this. Try to imagine her moving at this pace: it’s too fast for a walk and too slow for a run; it’s too regular and breathless even for a dance.

The clue comes in the next song on the album: ‘Davy’s Train Blues’. ‘Angi’ can only be a locomotive – an American locomotive – ambling through a midwestern town; neither speeding up nor slowing down, just implacably, imperturbably continuing on its way. Only a mythic wreck would stop it (‘The Wreck of the Old 97’). ‘Angi’ travels in a straight line, on tracks, and wherever it is headed isn’t all that different to the place it’s come from. There is variety, along the way, but no climaxes; vistas open out, briefly, then are curtailed. It’s what’s going on in the carriages that is full of life.

Harmonica players have always loved to imitate midnight expresses: chuffing, plaining. Woody Guthrie did it, Bob Dylan, also. Here, Davy Graham manages it, too. That plonk-plonk-kerplonk-plonk is the regular rhythm of the wheels on the sleepers; the maintained chime of the middle notes is the drone of the engine; those bent upper notes are the trademark whoo-whoo-whoo riff of the whistle. But this, to complicate things more, is an American locomotive as heard by a European.

In his diary entry of 31 July, Kafka wrote: ‘Sit on a train, forget the fact, and live as if you were at home; but suddenly recollect where you are, feel the onward-rushing power of the train, change into a traveller, take a cap out of your bag, meet your fellow travellers with a more sovereign freedom, with more insistence, let yourself be carried towards your destination by no effort of your own, enjoy it like a child, become a darling of the women, feel the perpetual attraction of the window, always have at least one hand extended on the window sill.’

Three years ago, I bought a decent guitar and – with the help of the AnyoneCanPlayGuitar video, and bearing Ciaran always in mind – taught myself to play ‘Angi’.

Recently, when I heard of his illness, I sent Ciaran a link to a video of me playing it – just about getting through – something I’d never have done, if it hadn’t been for his challenge.

He replied, ‘Bravo!’

I can only say that back, a thousand times.

Ciaran was probably the most intense human presence I’ve ever encountered. When he looked at you, it was like you were facing a bonfire. It was a blaze of a gaze. If he asked a question, he was really asking it of the most profound part of you – and so, usually, you felt like you hadn’t given an adequate answer. You hadn’t even begun. He sometimes asked the same question again. I feel the only adequate answer would, in each case, have been a poem. Or, perhaps, a song.

If you would like to read more about Ciaran Carson, from those who knew him properly, The Irish Times has some wonderful tributes.

Writing and Shit – part 13 – Exactly how not to begin your short story

Most of the examples I have given so far have been quite straightforward, unsubtle. The idea of the runaway bride, although something you might be happy to gossip about, may be the kind of on-the-surface, twisty story that you would never allow yourself to write.

But I think that the idea of Story-Time, and of the out-of-balance, can open up much more subtle and internal kinds of story. If what is out of balance is a relationship, or is a person’s psychological state, then it may not be necessary for the story you write to include any physical objects out of place.

Warning: However, beware of making your stories take place entirely inside your characters’ heads. This is a great thing to do, I often do it, but you are depriving yourself of the opportunities of having a colourful, textured outer world that reflects or contrasts with your characters’ inner worlds.

Before we move on within our Story-Time, because for the rest of this guide we’re going to stay within it, I’d like to give some more examples of how opening sentences of stories can immediately take the reader into Story-Time.

The first, which is very obvious, comes from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial:

Someone much have been telling lies about Joseph K, for quite without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.

The second example is from Raymond Carver’s short story ‘Viewfinder’.

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.

In both cases, what is immediately established is that we have already entered a time that is non-routine and that the world is – from now on – out of balance. In Kafka, in a huge way; in Carver, in a small.

 ON OPENING SENTENCES

 A lot of false emphasis is put on how important it is to write a great opening sentence.

It is an easy thing to screw writers up with. I was reluctant to quote examples, and to quote famous and great and often-quoted examples, because it might contribute to this false emphasis.

The false emphasis easily becomes false pressure, and then paranoia, and what results are hysterical first sentences that attempt to do far too much. I have succumbed to this many times.

What your opening sentence needs to do is open your story; what your opening sentence does not need to do is close your story.

The most important thing about an opening sentence is not that it tells the whole story in miniature or that it establishes themes or blah-di-blah. The most important thing is that it lets the reader know that Story-Time has begun – and it may do this by taking the reader immediately into the presence of a character for whom things are out of balance. But it may also do this by confidently, and unhysterically, addressing the reader in a voice or with a tone that lets them know Story-Time has begun. That is all.

The most basic thing an opening sentence should do is not fuck up the rest of the story.

Literary aside: Someone once wrote about the English writer V.S.Pritchett that the opening lines of his stories are ‘unpromising’. That, in a way, was their promise. What could possibly go on here? Ah, now I see…

Opening lines often do more harm than good – particularly if they are overwrought.

Nothing is worse, for the reader of a story, than to begin with hysteria and then immediately be dropped into anti-climax – perhaps for most of the remainder of the story.

For example –

On the day Joshua was disembowelled by aliens, he ate Cheerios for breakfast. He then got on the bus and went to work at the supermarket, where he stacked shelves. During his first break, he…

I read so many stories like this – okay, minus the aliens – stories that have no awareness at all they can rely on lots of givens that are in place before the opening line is read.

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

The first given that is in place, which gets less hysterical focus than the opening sentence, is the basic fact that I – the reader – already know, before I have read anything, that I am about to read what has set itself up to be a story.

I know this for various reasons – that it has come to be in a book with the author’s name on the cover, or an anthology with their name beside the story’s title on the contents page, or in a manuscript or file that I haven’t picked up randomly from an empty seat on an empty train carriage late at night.

Aside: It is very rare that any of us get the delightful experience of reading a truly found text – something we read partly in order to try to work out whether it is a story or someone’s diary or notes on someone’s psychoanalysis or whatever. This isn’t only to do with how it comes to us, it’s also to do with the form in which it appears. Diaries don’t tend to have titles, centred, in bold type. Psychoanalytic notes tend to have material in the header or somewhere on the page – numbers, codes. It’s more likely that we’ll be in joyous doubt as to what we’re reading if all we get is a single, orphaned handwritten page. A few of these precious texts have come my way.

So what the reader already knows, before you start telling them a story, is that – when they choose to turn to your first words – you are going to try to tell them a story. That is a given. It is therefore something you can use.

Not, I repeat not, by going straight into three pages of routine. That’s gone. You’re never doing that again.

However this knowledge a story is coming is, I think, what the writers who begin by describing their main person’s routine are banking on. The promise of a story is that something will happen so, if it’s not happening just yet, rest easy because it will eventually happen.

The danger is that, if you delay too long, you will lose the reader’s attention before they get to the bit where the routine is broken. They could always be reading something else in which their experience of Story-Time is more fulfilling from the first word onwards.

But I need to go back to the second of the givens of a story.

THE FIRST WORD BEFORE THE FIRST SENTENCE

The first word is often not the first word of the first sentence, whatever that is, but is The, because the first word is actually the first word of the story’s title.

The Color Purple, The Shining, The Luminaries, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

It may even be a one word title – Dune, Emma, Ulysses, Carrie, Rebecca – in which case the title’s work is done in just that word.

The title may have three or ten words, and all of them arrive with the reader before the opening sentence. They start the story.

Here we come to something we’re going to talk about a lot, later on – opening gaps.

Gaps are where stories take place, particularly short stories, because that’s where the work of the story is briefly handed over to the reader – and the reader does a better job of it than the writer.

For now, you need to be aware of – and beware of – doing what I call tying bows.

Many of us deskbound creatures have a tendency towards neatness, but obvious and early neatness in a story can be killing.

Remember the flipchart. We are aiming for an out-of-balance flipchart.

This, in almost this exact form, is how the majority of stories start –

THE PARTY

The guests began to arrive at Trevor’s party around half past six.

If I am judging a short story competition, or reading as editor of an anthology, let me tell you what I do when I have begun a story in which the opening line repeats the title – I turn or scroll immediately to the last line. If the story, as it almost fairly often does, ends like this –

As the last of the guests left, around half past two, Trevor was glad that his party was over, and that nothing worse had happened than the amusing incident with a blancmange. Already he could start looking forward to his next party!

then let me tell you what I do next. I put this story – which sadly isn’t much of a story – aside, and move on, with great hope, to the next one.

Okay, not all versions of ‘The Party’ include and conclude with the amusing incident of the blancmange, but most of them return to the opening sentence and recall the title (often with the final word).

In other words, they tie the story up with a neat little bow.

For me, stories which tie up with a neat little bow do not stand a chance of winning a competition or being good enough to be published.

Writers who tie bows aren’t describing a world I recognise or enjoy or want to spend my time in.

Sign here:

I promise never to tie bows.

———————————–

 

FISH STEW

The gap between the title of a story and the opening line – or should I say, the potential gap, is one that is there, waiting, pleading for you to use it. To use it to take the reader straight in to Story-Time.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with calling a story ‘The Party’. But, if you do, let it begin with something that is distant from anything partylike.

THE PARTY

 ‘I had the prisoners executed last night,’ said the General.

 or

THE PARTY

Nancy, with Timmy and Lola running behind her, could see their train on platform seven.

What a bow tied at the end of a story tells me is that the writer hasn’t taken the reader anywhere really interesting. Everything that happened within the story was a false out-of-balance, because – even with the blancmange – Trevor at the close of the story is merely a slightly more pissed version of Trevor at the beginning.

I don’t know about you, but I know there are stories out there that destroy Trevor in a way that makes me cry or elevate him to amazing glory or allow me profoundly to inhabit his Trevorness or give me a wild Trevory time perhaps even involving blancmange.

Rather than read of bow-tied Trevor, I could be reading these.

No bows. Promise me. Promise yourself.

Beware of all neatness and tidying up. Short stories, because they are about people or things in the wrong place, are killed when these people or things are swiftly put back in the right place.

A mess is better than a bow.

Lots of writers are attracted to writing stories that end neatly, and I think there is a reason for that – it’s that they, secretly, so secretly they themselves don’t even know they are doing it, they are not writing a story, they are writing a tale.

And tales are what we’ll be looking at next time.

Writing and Shit – part 12 – The Epic Flipchart of Will It? Won’t it?

I’d like to move on from my two definitions of a story, but do keep your marked up story-start because we’ll be going back to it.

I have tried very hard to find another way to talk about this next bit that avoids the phrase ‘Story-Time’.

It has associations – not bad associations – of the nursery and of the story mat at school. Come on, children, settle down – it’s Story-Time.

I don’t want you to dismiss what I’m going to say as infantile. It’s far from it.

Instead, I’d like to take those childish associations of Story-Time and make them into an obvious virtue.

What did you feel, back when you were a child, and someone announced they were going to tell you a story?

I don’t know about you, but I remember feeling excited – excited that I was about to hear something that wouldn’t be boring and that might very well be scary or funny or unusual. At the very least, it wouldn’t be a telling off.

I might already know the story that was about to be told, and – because I was sure what was going to happen – I could take comfort in it. The reading or telling would be a ritual. This is why, for most children who want stories retold, they want them retold exactly. Any failure of repetition is a step away from comfort.

Aside: As a writer, you are writing not just for the first reading of your story but for every subsequent reading. For me, it is the very definition of a great story, that it demands to be re-read, and that each time it is re-read, it shows itself capable of being read again without its pleasures being exhausted.

Literary aside: There are some writers, though they are very rare, who seem to write for more than one rereading. The best example I know of a book written this way is Emma by Jane Austen. Without spoiling it, if you haven’t read it, the first reading contains a basic mystery – who made the gift of a piano? Although the reader may guess who sent the piano, and their motives for sending it, it’s only on a second reading that the reader is able to view everything that happens in the novel through certain knowledge of the identity of the piano-sender. This, for me, made the second reading even more pleasurable than the first.

I would ask you to compare Jane Austen’s Emma to an Agatha Christie novel – say, Murder on the Orient Express. Again, without giving away the twist, I can say that the moment you finish this whodunit, you’re unlikely to want to read the story again. Because now you know. The experience with Agatha Christie books tends to be, Ah, I enjoyed that one, now I’ll pick up another. Addicted readers of Agatha Christie (I’m one) go back to novels they read years ago, perhaps without remembering that they did, and get fifty pages in before thinking, Oh, it’s this one again – I already know who did it. Then they probably stop reading.

In writing a story, you are attempting to create the excitement of the first reading rather than the comfort of the tenth.

But you should – at the same time – be aware that the more you put in, on a conscious and unconscious level, the more there will be for readers to get out on readings after the first.

If you think you understand your story completely, you know what it’s really about, that may be a sign that you’re not leaving enough for more than one reading.

THE EPIC FLIPCHART OF NARRATIVE DEMONSTRATION

This bit is one where, when I’m teaching, I make use of the flipchart.

Often, when students come up to me afterwards – months afterwards – they say this is what they most remember.

We can’t be in a room together, with me standing next to a flipchart, so I am going to have to describe what you’d see and hear were you there.

By this point, I’ve been speaking for a while. I’ve introduced the idea of things out of place and things going wrong. I’ve suggested they avoid describing routines. And now I want to get even more basic.

Why do we like stories? I ask. What is it about stories that holds our attention?

Then I say, This flipchart has been standing here for a while, beside me, and you’ve seen it but you haven’t paid particular attention to it.

(I will have made sure I haven’t written anything on the flipchart for a few minutes, and unobtrusively will have turned the large page to a blank sheet.)

Now, I say, as I approach the flipchart, you are paying attention to it. While I’m talking about it, the flipchart is becoming more interesting to you.

Why are we interested in stories? What is it in stories that draws our attention?

I take hold of the back of the flipchart so that it is no longer standing on three legs – two about fifty centimetres apart at the front and one that is attached at the top and swings inward, at the back.

I hold the flipchart so it is vertical, rather than slightly inclined backwards.

My answer is, I say, that – as human beings, as animals – we are fascinated by anything that is out of balance. Our eyes are drawn to things that are moving, yes – but if they move in a regular way, if they turn in perpetual circles or always go up and down, up and down, they soon lose our attention. What is more fascinating to us, as alert and potentially threatened creatures, are things that move in an unpredictable way. We will spend longer looking at an object that moves randomly than one that moves in a way we can quickly work out is predictable (round and round, up and down). But as soon as we have figured out that an object is moving randomly, within fixed limits, and that those limits mean it won’t come dangerously close to us, we will look away from it. What will hold our attention even more powerfully is a thing that is out of balance and that could go one way or the other.

At this point, I let go of the flipchart so that it balances for a moment on two legs.

I have tried to balance the flipchart as evenly as I can, so that I myself don’t know which way gravity will take it.

It could fall forwards, all the way forwards, and slam loudly down on the carpet, or it could tip backwards, the rear leg extending, and it could land on that leg and restabilize, or the leg might not extend fast enough, and the flipchart could crash loudly on the carpet that way.

Just as the flipchart has made clear it’s going forwards or backwards, I grab hold of it again.

You are relieved – it’s stable. It’s not going to make a very loud noise and possibly break. And get me into trouble with the organizers.

I say, You were interested in the flipchart, weren’t you? You were very focussed on it – to the exclusion of the rest of the room, including me. What was going to happen? Which way was it going to fall? Because it was out of balance, and because it could go one way or the other, you – as an alert creature – couldn’t help looking at it.

FROM FLIPCHART TO TRAIN

Imagine you are on a platform at a country station, waiting for a train. The train before yours has just got in, and you see a mother with two young children running across the railway bridge from the opposite platform, hoping to catch that train. The doors are still open, and the mother and children are getting closer, but then one of the children drops its cuddly toy.

The mother tries to pull the child on, but it resists – it wants to go back for the cuddly toy.

The mother relents, runs back, grabs the toy herself, and resumes the dash towards the train – the doors of which have now begun to beep.

Not just you, everyone on the platform is likely to be caught up in this fascinating binary drama. Will they make it or won’t they?

Perhaps someone intervenes, to hold the doors open. Perhaps the mother makes it through, and the first child, but then the doors close and the second child is left on the platform as the train pulls away.

Have you noticed that someone was in the wrong place? (The mother and children not already on the right platform.) And then something was in the wrong place? (The cuddly toy no longer in the child’s grasp.) And that something went wrong, and then more wrong? (The toy being dropped causing the slight delay that meant the second child was left behind.) But because I’m not that cruel, at least not in a masterclass, I say, But it’s alright – this time the mother and her children make it onto the train. It was the toy that fell down again, onto the track, and was left behind.

PHEW

Now, I say, back to the flipchart. I rest it back on its swingy rear leg and walk away from it. How interesting is it to you now?

Not very, you say.

Interesting at all? I say.

Not really, you say.

Okay, I say, and I return to the flipchart and put it back to vertical, rear leg swinging free.

How interesting is it now? I say.

Quite, you say. Or you say, Very.

I tip the flipchart further forwards, so it’s clear that this is the direction in which it would fall – there is no swingy rear leg to stop it. It would go down with a loud slam, and might break.

Is it more or less interesting now? I say.

More, you say.

I tip it further forwards.

More or less interesting?

Maybe you say more and maybe you say less.

I say, What’s more interesting to you now, the flipchart or me?

You, you say.

I tip the flipchart all the way forward and rest it on the carpet.

Is the flipchart interesting now? I say.

Hmm, not really, you say.

Why not? I ask.

And you say, Because it’s not doing anything or Because it’s stable or I know it’s not going to slam down.

WILL HE, WON’T HE?

Good, I say. Then I go back and pick the flipchart up and hold it so it’s tipping forwards, out of balance, definitely going to fall that way.

I say, What’s more interesting now, the flipchart or me?

Both, you say.

And this is the bit the students remember, because now I let go of the flipchart and it falls forwards – pages fluttering up – and SLAM it hits the carpet and wafts air out over everyone in front of it. And there is some shock, because I may – in my attempt to explain and demonstrate Story-Time – have broken someone else’s property.

Then I pick the flipchart up again, put it back onto its rear leg and with my handy marker pen write upon it –

WE ARE FASCINATED BY THINGS THAT ARE OUT OF BALANCE

This is what’s beneath my two definitions of story, because it explains how our eyes move, and what – in our visual field – they are drawn towards.

Movies, because they are stories, are about things and people in the wrong place, and about things going wrong and more wrong. But also, visually, they depend on objects that are in one way or another out of balance.

Where we’ve got now is ready to bring home the discussion of Story-Time.

Story-Time must take us into a situation that is in, in some way, out of balance.

A basic sign that we’re in Story-Time is that we ask ourselves, Is it going to smash?

Or, to make it even clearer:

If the situation is not out of balance, Story-Time isn’t happening.

Think about your story-start. What within it is out of balance? Everything or anything or nothing?

Think about one small change you could make, in order to turning it into an epic flipchart.

Patience, and some useful quotations about it and other subjects (for writers and readers)

For a long while, Patience was going to have an epigraph – on the first page of the novel; before ‘1979’ and ‘Please be patient with me’. But I cut it.

It was this Franz Kafka aphorism:

There are two cardinal human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they do not return. But perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

In the end, I didn’t want to interrupt Elliott’s voice – to make the book appear more literary, or theological, than it already did.

One of the strangest things about Kafka’s aphorism is that he seems to change his mind, or refine his idea, even within these few words. I think this makes his argument more powerful – because it dramatizes a human temporality, and a human frailty. Look, I am getting it wrong right in front of your eyes. It also emphasizes that this is not a conventionally cute epigrammatic statement of the sort A is to B as C is to D. That sort of aperçu opens out into comparison; the word widens the world. Instead, Kafka’s wording is a narrowing down to or a closing in on the single sin, impatience.

There were other things said or written about patience that I didn’t intend to include, not in the printed version of the book, but which I wrote down in my notebooks.

One was Henry James’s line, ‘be one of those on whom nothing is lost’. This comes from ‘The Art of Fiction’. Every writer should know it.

But most of the quotations I copied into the front of the three big black notebooks in which I wrote Patience were glimpses of the kind of writing I thought it required, and reminders to myself to commit to that fully.

I’m going to put them down here, in the order they appear on those pages. I notice now that most of them are from Rainer Maria Rilke. Behind them all (but not copied out) is this passage from the sort-of novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I first saw it excerpted in the book of translations by Stephen Mitchell that Picador published. (If you haven’t read Rilke before, I would recommend that as a perfect beginning.) There it was called ‘What does a poem take?’

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

The way women are mentioned in it is questionable, at the very least. And, yes, this seems extremely romantic, and also dismayingly exacting, but I think it’s true. Or true, at least, for the poetry, and other writing, that I value most – which, above nearly all, is Rilke’s own.

One of the first copied quotations was from Michael Hamburger’s translation of Holderlin’s ‘Prayer for the Incurable’.

Hurry, denature them wholly, up against frightful non-being

            Bring them, or never they’ll know just how denatured they are.

I am sure I don’t understand this, not in any way. But I think it’s about a way of perceiving and recording; it’s about how strange and estranged one has to be, in re-presenting experience.

Next is:

We can only see what we are by looking ahead of ourselves…

Which comes from Merleau-Ponty’s astounding essay, ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, Sense and Non-Sense, 1964. I keep rereading this. It’s full of head-rearranging things.

We can only see what we are by looking ahead of ourselves…

This includes Elliott’s white wall.

The next is a single line from the podcast S-Town, from the makers of This American Life. If you haven’t listened to it, please do. It is the most unpredictable and anguishing piece of storytelling I have heard, in that form. I think it’s spoken by the main person in the documentary, John B. McLemore:

“You just learn to live without.”

I am not sure what Rilke is describing in this next quotation – from the Letters on Cézanne – but it’s what Elliott is noticing throughout the book.

..an event which most people no longer had the patience to experience…

With, hopefully, this kind of sensuous intensity:

One taste of the orange… After that, who

could forget how it drowns in itself, yet resists its

own sweetness? But look, you have caught it,

            possessed it –

it’s taste, now deliciously changed into you

This is ‘Orange’, by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Orpheus, a wonderful book of translations by Don Paterson.

Finally, there is this observation – which I’d almost call a manifesto. When writing, all the senses should be simultaneously and equally alive. How little writing achieves this. If nothing else, it’s an ideal. These words are in Rainer Maria Rilke, Primal Sound, pg 130.

At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time, that the modern European poet makes use of those contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them – sight overladen with the seen world – seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of the other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interruptions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that the world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane, which is, in fact the plane of the poem.

 

 

 

 

D.H.Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley: Review

 

 

Lawrence is one of the easiest writers to dismiss, and one of the hardest to get away from. He seems – from a rational point of view – so often and so obviously nuts. And there’s a way of reading him that brackets the ‘obviously nuts’ parts, and enjoys him as if he were a more simpler writer who was good at describing the countryside, the mining villages, relations between heterosexual men and women, and relations between social classes.

Lawrence is hard to get away from because he seems (to me) to ask the hardest questions. For example, How do we live? What is important to us? Also, What can a novel achieve? Why is it worth writing about particular individuals?

To this second pair of questions, I think he has a better answer than almost any other writer I know. I don’t think Joyce’s answer, in Ulysses, can compete. Joyce seems to say, It’s worth writing about Bloom because he’s an ordinary man, and ordinary men are all extraordinary, and I’ve happened from my godlike position to choose this little beggar. And I don’t think Joyce’s answer in Finnegans Wake will do either. Here Joyce says, It’s worth writing about HCE because he’s Everyman, and you can’t write about anybody more important than Everyman, and I’m going to write about Everyman more universally than anyone ever has before, so there.

Other writers have different answers. Woolf seems to say, in The Waves, I’m writing about these people because, on the fringes of their experience, is something that has never been recorded before – it’s been seen as trivial, as fleeting rather than essential.

Forster says, We’re all in a terrible muddle, and it might comfort you to see some people muddling through their particular muddle.

I’m mentioning Lawrence’s contemporaries. Among writers working today, it’s rare for someone to believe a novel can be much more than an entertainment – ultimately. (If they do believe something more ambitious, they’re likely to keep quiet about it.) Perhaps the novel is a feat of empathy, or a specific social insight, or a panoptic vision of a fracturing culture, or a set of unprecedentedly immaculate sentences. These are some present day options.

Lawrence, I think, says this: It’s worth writing about Lady Constance Chatterley and Oliver Parkin because they are a test case. They – like the two pairs of lovers in Women in Love – are pioneers in their human relations. Or, if not pioneers, they are such rare birds as to be important in themselves. How often is such unrestricted contact (this is still Lawrence) between woman and man attempted? How frequently does such a large gulf class open within a couple, and can it be bridged? Can the conflict between intellectual being and fleshly being ever be resolved except at moments of orgasm?

Sometimes what is most touching about Lawrence is his absurd clumsiness in going at these questions, and sometimes what is breathtaking is how delicately he achieves a statement or a moment. If you can integrate the two of these approaches into one writer, you are getting close to a sympathetic reading of Lawrence. The characters in The First Lady Chatterley are, alternately, clumsy and delicate with one another.

Here is Parkin, the former gamekeeper, on Lady Chatterley and her class:

You folks is all doors, an’ you keep ’em all shut even with yourselves. And sometimes you never open one, and sometimes you open two. But you niver open ’em all, not to God nor man nor the devil. You’ve always got yourselves shut up somewhere where nothing can get at you: Though a body might think you was open as the day –

I do think that dismissing Lawrence is closing yet another door. And the more blithely you do it, the less you’ve learned from even the gesture of dismissal. He believed the novel had a real purpose, in driving people (readers) toward a more fulfilling life. He pursued that purpose in a way that was not tasteful or terribly considered – and so it’s embarrassing. He tried to write with all doors open. For this alone, it’s worth closely reading The First Lady Chatterley. It’s a book about, among many other things, class war. The section in the middle, about the hot-blooded ones and the cold-blooded ones, about two irreconcilable ways of being in the world, seems particularly timely.

Moving images of writer of novel, Patience, writing novel, Patience – nothing more