Toby Litt's Blog, page 8

Writing and Shit – part 29 – What kind of writer are you?

STORY TIME REDUX

We’ve already begun to think about stories and time and how they fit together, how they are sometimes the same thing – story-time.

Not all story-times are the same. And this is where I would like to propose a different way for you to think about your own writing, and a different way to think about different kinds of writing.

Different kinds of writing usually get called ‘genres’.

On Amazon.com, under Books & Audible -> Books -> Fiction we have a menu of thirty types of book. Some of these aren’t exactly genres, in the way I’m about to describe. Saying something is an ‘Anthology’ or ‘Contemporary Fiction’ doesn’t tell you anything about the kind of story-time you’re about to enter.

Other genres are are more descriptive of potential story-time. In a ‘Horror novel’, you will experience horror – that may include different kinds of horror, some more suspenseful, some more gory. But if you bought a book from beneath this heading and it didn’t horrify you in some way, it would have been mis-categorised and mis-sold. Other genre titles descriptive of effect would be ‘Erotica,’ ‘Political’ and ‘Romance.’

Mostly, writers in their early years ask themselves –

 WHAT KIND OF WRITER AM I?

This is the wrong question. Too easily it turns into an aspiration. In fact, What kind of writer am I? is often a disguised version of What kind of books would I like to write?

The answer to What kind of writer am I? is always Not the writer I should be.

If you are happy with the writer you are, and don’t want to be another, better writer, I’m not sure why you’ve got this far into this blog.

(Maybe you’ve just joined us. In which case, welcome. Now go back to the beginning.)

What kind of books would I like to write? Is too daydreamy a question. It’s going to lead you into fantasies of achievement from which you’ll learn nothing about the writing itself.

For example, I’d like to write the kind of books that win big literary prizes. What can you learn from that? What, within that, can you examine in any way?

Nothing.

Literary aside: Surprisingly often, the books that win big literary prizes aren’t the kind of books that win big literary prizes. To take two examples from the UK’s Booker Prize, D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was not a prizewinning kind of book. Neither was Marlon James’ A History of Seven Killings. Or at least, they weren’t a prizewinning kind of book until after they’d won a prize. Then they became that kind of book, because the prize had changed to accommodate them. But they weren’t like the kind of books that had won the prize the year before they did. They weren’t consensus books.

Obviously, if you’re trying to write a kind of book, you can only do it if that kind of book can be identified.

And that is how some writers end up thinking of themselves as genre writers before they’ve even finished a chapter.

GENRE KICKS

I’m going to change the question for you to ask, and make it far more concrete.

Not What kind of writer am I? but What kind of reader am I?

To answer this, you need to say to yourself, What kind of books do I read? Not What kind of books do I like to think of myself as reading? And not What kind of books do I buy with good intentions but leave in the reading pile? But What kind of books to I read often and with pleasure?

Exercise: Write down the titles and authors and genres of the last five books you read from start to finish.

Not novels, not just fiction. The last five books. (Comics count. Magazines don’t.) If they were all non-fiction – memoirs, histories or biographies – but you still think you are a writer of literary fiction, there may be an issue.

(If you can’t remember reading five books, go and read five books. I’m serious. If you don’t regularly read, you’re not really a writer. I’m glad you’re reading this blog of mine – but, essentially, fuck off to the library, now.)

Look at the list. Take it as a self-portrait. Can you make it more honest? Less flattering?

What kind of reader are you?

I’d like to push this question further, by putting it into my own terms. As a reader, what kind of story-time or what kinds of story-time do you like to enter?

Be honest.

To help you be honest, I’d like you to write another list – I’d like you to write this

Exercise: Write down the titles and authors and genres of the last five books you started but didn’t finish.

It may be because you’re reading them very slowly, enjoying every word, but equally it may be because you found them bad, boring, pretentious or too intense.

Now put the two lists alongside one another, the recently read list to the left and the didn’t finish list to the right.

It’s almost certain that the books on the right hand side represent the kind of books you would like to write whereas those on the left represent the kind of writer you are because they represent the kind of reader you are.

Aside: Readers are rarely just one kind of reader. There are few people who read nothing but historical romance of the Elizabethan period or science fiction involving robots, but the likelihood is that most readers have books they read just for fun or on holiday and other books they read because they want to learn something or take on something big or read a really good book.

The list on the left may reveal you to be a number of different readers. Try to find links between the books on the left. Do they all involve mothers, confinement, wilderness, politics?

What kind of reader you are depends on what kind of story-time you habitually like to enter.

And, as a writer, as a storyteller, this is likely to be the kind of story-time you are best at creating for your own readers.

Yes.

Writing and Shit – part 28 – Non-stories, the Eiffel Tower and North Korea

Here is a non-story.

A waiter works in the café at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Every smoking break, he goes and looks at the view. Afterwards, he goes back inside the café and continues serving customers.

Here is a story.

An old Korean woman who lives in North Korea has a secret – hidden in a hole in a wall of her apartment, she has an old French grammar textbook and, within it, a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. When no-one is around, which is rare, she goes through the lessons. Although she knows the book by heart, still she learns. And although she can see the Eiffel Tower with her eyes closed, still she looks at the postcard. One day, the old woman’s nine year-old granddaughter returns unexpectedly to the flat, and hears the strange sounds her grandmother is making with her mouth. She comes into the old woman’s room and sees the grandmother’s book and postcard. Terrified, the grandmother tries to hide them. But as it’s clear the granddaughter has already seen what’s up, the grandmother decides she has to trust her granddaughter. The grandmother explains what French is, what Paris is and what the Eiffel Tower is. The granddaughter says she wants to learn French so that one day she can visit Paris and go up the Eiffel Tower. And so, in secret, the grandmother begins teaching the granddaughter French.

Exercise: Think for a few moments, of the story you could write, continuing from this point. Write a few notes.

Now I’m going to make a suggestion. Somehow, to make this play out, you need to take the granddaughter, out of North Korea, all the way to Paris and up the Eiffel Tower.

Think of how many scenes you would have to write, in order for the nine year-old granddaughter to grow into the young woman and for the young woman to escape North Korea and travel to Paris. Things will go wrong, and more wrong, and she’ll come through.

Okay, instead of that, think of writing the story of the waiter. Or rather, think of trying to turn the non-story of the waiter into a story.

Your efforts would have to go into the details of his consciousness. And that’s do-able, certainly. But what’s out of place? What’s going wrong and more wrong?

Now, instead, let’s put the  waiter and the North Korean girl alongside one another, looking at Paris from the Eiffel Tower. They both say, ‘It is beautiful,’ but for one it is a routine beauty, for the other it is an incredible, joyous, grief-filled beauty.

Here’s the most important thing.

For each of the two, answer the question: Why this day? Why this hour?

For the young woman, the answer is – in fact – the telling of the whole story. Why this day? Well, because years ago, my grandmother who lived in North Korea had a secret…

For the waiter, there is no good answer – unless the answer is, Because this is the day I, as the waiter, have randomly chosen to write about in this eventful language. For the waiter, as for the person in Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine, it is not the quality of their day but the quality of the language that describes it that makes the story. What is out of place? The words. (The waiter is obviously a writer.)

Or, possibly, the answer is, Because this is the day you, as the writer, have chosen to write about an invented waiter in eventful language.

The less that happens for the people in the story, the more that has to happen in the words giving them to the reader.

Going back to your story-start, can you answer those questions?: Why this hour? Why this day? Can you answer with a strong, confident answer? Why this day and not the day before, or the same day of the week a week later?

If there isn’t a clear reason for why this hour, then you might be trying to tell a non-story.

My North Korea story, may be exaggerated, sentimental, unrealistic, but I don’t think you can say it’s not a story. And, more than this, I don’t think you can say it’s not (at least potentially) involving and moving.

Briefly, let’s provide the waiter with two answers for Why this hour?

Here is a first answer.

A waiter works in the café at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. One smoking break, he goes to look at the view of Paris which he has seen so often he has come to take it entirely for granted. He stands beside a young Asian woman who is looking out over the rooftops and crying. ‘How beautiful it is,’ she says, in perfect French. ‘How beautiful.’ And the writer looks at the city and sees it properly for the first time in years, and says, ‘Yes, it is.’

 Here is a second answer.

A waiter has been working in the café at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris for years. But today is his last day. He is getting too old. Yesterday he spilled hot soup on a tourist wearing shorts. They didn’t have to go to hospital, but they did threaten to sue. The café manager wanted to fire the waiter immediately, but the waiter begged to be allowed to work one more day – just one more day – because if he did the one more day he would have worked in the café for exactly fifty years. During his smoking break, he goes to look at the view of Paris. ‘How beautiful it is,’ he says. ‘How beautiful.’ He says this in Korean because, years ago, it was on this spot that he met his future wife and she said those same words to him, in French.

Exercise: Write a non-story. It need only be a page long. Write about someone going about their routine. But do this in full awareness you’re writing a non-story, and that your concentration is on representing a whole life through undramatic details.

Why this hour?

It’ll soon be time to talk about time.

 

 

Writing and Shit – part 27 – Come on, that’s just not realistic

BUT THAT JUST WOULDN’T HAPPEN –

IT’S NOT AT ALL REALISTIC

Oh dear. It’s like Mr But has taken over the section titles. He’s making a bid for total power.

Mr But has more to say. I’m going to let him speak for as long as he wants:

You’re taking examples from Hollywood movies – The Karate Kid and Rocky – that are already all about fighting. The stories I want to tell are nothing like this. I know you’ve said that these kind of power struggles can equally take place in a nunnery, but you’re forcing a kind of unsubtle version of human relationships onto us. We’re not Hollywood. Most of life – perhaps all of life – is nothing like that at all. People generally get on quite well with one another. It’s just that they face difficulties in trying to be happy or find love or stay healthy. Those are the kinds of story I want to tell – not these exaggerated muscle-fests. The example you gave of the two brothers at school. That would never happen. Changes that big in who people really are out there in the world just don’t take place. It’s a fantasy, not reality.

Some stories, I agree, are wish fulfilment. They are comforting tales of victory against the odds that we can enjoy because we like seeing bullies beaten and justice done.

FALLIBLE

What I’m trying to do, in perhaps an exaggerated way, is guide you away from writing non-scenes in non-stories.

Hollywood is the most successful and influential storytelling industry in human history. We exist, as storytellers, within a world where people’s expectation of what makes a good story is influenced by movies. And yet, at the same time, the most typical conversation you’ll overhear when you come out of a movie adapted from a book is that the movie wasn’t as good as the book.

Hollywood has a tendency toward telling the strongest story – that is, as I’ve defined it, the story that involves the greatest zap of story energy. And the story energy comes from the most radical shift in power relations within the shortest space of time.

(I haven’t yet talked specifically about reversals, but I will soon.)

Hollywood’s desire to tell stories involving the most radical shift in power relations means that it ends up telling and retelling the same story just with bigger and bigger special effects.

PRETZEL LOGIC

Q: Is it more exciting, from Hollywood’s point of view, for what is in peril to be one person in a car or thirty people in a bus?

A: Thirty people in a bus.

Q: Is it more exciting, after you’ve already had thirty people in a bus in peril, to have another thirty people in peril in a bus or three hundred people in a small Californian town.

A: Small Californian town.

Q: Is it more exciting to have the small town, or the whole of L.A.?

A: Well, L.A., obviously.

Q: The whole of L.A. or the whole of America?

A: Might as well have America.

Q: The whole of America or the whole world? (Represented by well-known national icons such as the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal.)

A: The Whole World, and every building that’s ever appeared inside a snow-globe.

This is why Hollywood’s stories are so often about saving everyone on the planet from total annihilation.

Exercise: Think about this: What is the highest number of people you’ve put at risk, or killed off, in one of your stories? One or a billion or nine billion? Or more? Does this answer tell you anything about the genre you’re writing in? Would escalation, or de-escalation, have moved your story into another genre?

SMALL STUFF

Hollywood is generally more modest, though, than comics. In a comic like The Silver Surfer, it is often about saving everything in existence from total annihilation. In a recent run all worlds everywhere were destroyed then recreated from the mind of a single person.

Similarly, Doctor Who has escalated to the extent that the whole universe, past and future, is regularly what’s at stake. Though thrilling the first time, there’s no going beyond this – and the tone has become unremittingly hysterical. After you’ve saved the universe, everything else is an anticlimax.

Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, adapting a comic (The Infinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin, and pencilled by George Pérez and Ron Lim), has changed Hollywood’s stakes to something more comic-like. Half of all living beings killed, then saved. Still not as many as Matt Smith’s Doctor Who brought back.

So, Mr But, I agree with you entirely about Hollywood not being realistic.

It’s mostly to do with –

 EXPECTATIONS

Next Friday.

Writing and Shit – part 26 – Scenes

WHAT IS A SCENE?

Or, more usefully –

WHEN IS A SCENE?

Going back to our Winning dialogue, in which two people are both trying to win the argument, and so win the scene – there are only a very few ways this can play out.

Underdog defeats Top Dog and becomes Top Dog (Change)
Top Dog defeats Underdog and stays Top Dog (Chance of Change)
Top Dog and Underdog draw and have to work out a way of sharing power (Choice)
Top Dog and Underdog unite to fight Strange Dog (Choice)

By the end of the scene, Top Dog is either still Top Dog or has been replaced by the Underdog – or, possibly, they have reached an agreement to stop fighting for power within a limited sphere, and to unite to face a common enemy, Strange Dog.

If all this is sounding a bit too male and macho, it shouldn’t. That’s my fault. These kind of conflicts could equally well be occurring inside a nunnery or a lesbian separatist commune. The verbal fight may be over who has the highest status, or it would be about who feels sorriest for a friend who has breast cancer.

One of the main points of the scene could be that an entirely undeclared war is taking place, and that none of the parties can appear to be doing anything hostile – anything other than getting on wonderfully well.

Some of the fiercest, funniest or saddest exchanges can also take place over who is Underdog. How many times have you overheard a conversation whose barely buried meaning is I have suffered followed by Yes, but I have suffered more. People can be merciless in their attempt to occupy the position of Greatest Victim.

Within scenes, as within dialogue, there is power, there is fear and there is ego.

Mr But: You’re painting a very bleak picture of humanity here. I can easily imagine a scene in which everyone agrees – in which everyone gets on and likes one another.

GONE WRONG

Okay, let’s take that as our start point. Let’s play a scene two ways – Mr But’s and mine.

An abandoned warehouse. A gang meets to plan a bank raid. They are called A, B, C and D. They are an unusual group in that they have no leader. Everyone within the group is equally valued and listened to. The conversation goes like this: 

D: I suggest we do it next Wednesday.

C: Sounds like a good idea.

A: Great. And I suggest we divide the money up equally, because we’re all taking the same risk…

B: Fine by me.

C: Okey-dokey.

D: That sounds like an equitable agreement. Does anyone have anything else to say?

B: Well, afterwards, I think we should all promise to try to spend the money as discreetly as possible – so as not to alert the police.

A: I agree 100%.

Now, let’s say the raid goes ahead, on the Wednesday, but that turns out to be the day of the annual parade – and when the robbers emerge from the bank, carrying bags of notes, they run straight into an entire police battalion. A gunfight ensues. D is shot but A, B and C make it back to the abandoned warehouse. What next? What scene can possibly take place?

D: Which idiot suggested we do the raid on Wednesday?

C: You did.

B: And we all agreed to it.

D: Oh. Right.

Or:

 D: Why did I ever suggest Wednesday for the raid?

C: Don’t beat yourself up about it. We all agreed to it.

B: Yes, and we’re equally at fault for not checking the calendar to see what was happening that day…

Alternatively, for our start point, we can have a scene like this:

D: I suggest we do it next Wednesday.

C: No, Wednesday’s too soon – we need more time to plan, get everything in place.

B: The longer we wait, the more chance they change the combination on the safe – I say we go Wednesday.

A: Isn’t Wednesday the day of the annual –

D: Shut up – no-one wants to listen to you.

Raid goes ahead, as does parade. A is shot. B, C and D make it back to the abandoned warehouse.

C: I told him Wednesday was too soon – we needed more time to plan.

B: I tried to tell D about the parade, but D just wouldn’t listen.

D: Are you saying I fucked up and got A killed? Is that what you’re saying, because if that’s what you’re saying just come out and say it.

B: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

There may be a point in a story where a scene of perfect or apparently accord is the best thing – the fragile peace, the happy ending – but if you have a group of people who all agree completely about everything, then, in a sense, they reduce down to one person. What happens to them, after they have come to an easy and unanimous decision, rebounds upon them equally. None of them takes greater or lesser responsibility for what went wrong. And because of what went wrong, they have been brought even closer together in terms of power relations. They are all equally to blame, they are all equally guilty. In story terms, there has been no gain in energy. We’re heading, at least within the group, towards stagnation.

Aside: By having the Underdog, A, die, there is less need for there to be a scene afterwards in which a fight takes place over who is going to be the new Top Dog – as would be the case if the one who died was D.

The greatest story energy is created by the greatest amount of change in power relations.

IT WAS BETWEEN THE BROTHERS

We have a story or two brothers, the older of whom has always bullied the younger. But the younger has secretly been taking kung fu lessons from a kooky caretaker he met. One day, when he has learned enough, the younger brother warns the older brother not to disrespect him any more. At this, the older brother tries – as always – to take the younger brother’s pocket money. Several swift and shocking kung fu moves later, the older brother is down on the ground shouting ‘Pax!’ and the power relations between them have been forever changed.

This, or a less straightforward version of this, could make a short story.

But now we have a story of two brothers who go to a very big school. The older brother is Top Dog in the entire school. Anyone challenges him, he destroys them. The younger brother is Underdog of the whole school. Even the smallest children laugh at him. And he does nothing… Until he meets a kooky caretaker who gives him kung fu lessons. One day in the family kitchen, when he has learned enough, the younger brother warns the older brother not to disrespect him any more – especially at school. The story plays out as above, except the fight takes place in the playground, in front of the entire school. The younger brother doesn’t just overtake his older brother, he overtakes everyone present.

This amount of story energy is probably too much for a short story or adult novel to contain. It’s The Karate Kid, and that was a movie. More exactly, it was a movie within the Rocky genre. Total Underdog trains to become Top Dog. This makes for scene after scene after scene of maximum shift in power relations.

What is the story if the central person isn’t Rocky Balboa but is the reigning World Heavyweight Boxing Champion? What scene is necessary, until the title fight itself?

When is a scene? A scene is when there is a moment of change, or chance, or chance of change.

THE ROCKIES

The World Heavyweight Boxing Champion’s training regime is a routine – it’s not a story, it isn’t an event. Rocky Balboa’s training montage is an extended moment of change, in that he’s becoming more and more capable of challenging for the title. With every weight he lifts, he increases the chance of change. With every weight the World Champion lifts, he decreases the chance of change. (The audience, who want a story, support the Underdog simply because if they don’t there’s nothing for them worth watching – unless they’re boxers looking to pick up training tips from the World Champion.)

Story-start: Was there any scene within what you wrote down that demanded a follow-up scene be written? This doesn’t necessarily have to be on the level of preparation for a major event such as a bank raid or a title fight. It could be as simple as someone making a doctor’s appointment or arranging to meet a friend for coffee.

More exactly, was there anything in your story-start where an A and a B had different approaches to the same problem?

And and and.

On For Marx by Louis Althusser

I wrote this for a panel event at Birkbeck College. The brief was to write about ‘A Book that Change my Life (Involving Critical Theory)’. It was intended for the MPhil and PhD students attending, but is about how early work relates to completed work, within individual projects but also within lives and oeuvres. If you wanted to read something exceptional on this subject, though not necessarily right, have a look at Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’.

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I’ll start by quoting. This is from the final paragraph of Louis Althusser’s ‘On the Young Marx’, pg 85-86

..if we are prepared to stand back a little from Marx’s discovery so that we can see that he founded a new scientific discipline and that this emergence itself was analogous to all the great scientific discoveries of history, we must also agree that no great discovery has ever been made without bringing to light a new object or a new domain, without a new horizon of meaning appearing, a new land in which the old images and myths have been abolished – but at the same time the inventor of this new world must of absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves, he must have learnt and practised them, and by criticizing them formed a taste for and learnt the art of manipulating abstract forms in general, without which familiarity he could never have conceived new ones with which to think the new object. In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great human discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to discover in the very way he must forget.

This – because I can’t see how it isn’t in some way based upon it, rather than just alluding to it – will allow me to quote from the single book that most changed my life – the Everyman Library edition of The Poems of Keats, which I bought in Pemberton’s second-hand Bookshop in Bedford when I was fifteen years-old. Althusser figures Marx just as Keats figures Cortez in his sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold

    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ;

    Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

    That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne ;

    Yet never did I breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

    When a new planet swims into his ken ;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

    He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Althusser also, I think, is rewriting a Marxist idea within what seems – when put alongside Keats – an idiom that is gendered (for both writers, the discoverer is resolutely ‘he’), colonial, and romantic. In the first Volume of Capital, writing of ideology, Marx wrote:

The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must first be discovered by science. Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin.

[Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Penguin Classics, translated  by Ben Fowkes, pg 682]

There is a great difference between Marx’s stumbling approximately onto the true state of affairs and Althusser’s and Keat’s discovering or conjuring a new ocean or a new planet. If we are thinking of engaging in the work of de-colonization, these are all vital and marvellously questionable and deeply self-incriminating texts.

I’m not going to defend choosing Althusser. It may be indefensible – For Marx is the text of a man who ended up strangling his wife, being declared insane, spending three years in a psychiatric hospital, coming out and writing a memoir about the murder. Should it therefore be ignored? In my opinion, no. I think it is if not essential then lucky that some of the thinkers who dominate contemporary thought – Nietzsche for his supposed anticipation of fascism and Heidegger for his definite espousal of Nazism – are utterly tainted, deeply questionable. If they were completely ‘clean’ and ‘nice’, wouldn’t we be tempted to treat them too worshipfully – as the Victorians treated Thomas Carlyle? Doesn’t their taintedness enforce a critical response to the basis of their critical thought? We can’t just read the good guys.

Reading Keats made me want to be a poet; from my failure to be a poet came the desire to be a writer of some sort; and from my reading of the Modernists came the desire to be a writer who made it new. In order to do this, I felt – whilst at university and ever since – that I needed two main things: first, I needed to get into my mind and eyes and bones the most essential examples of what had already been done; second, I needed to change who I was, in order to become someone capable of perceiving and making new stuff. In Althusser’s words, ‘the individual who makes himself the author’.

A PhD, in the definition I still hold to (when I’m acting as External Examiner, as I’ve done a few times now) is ‘a significant original contribution to knowledge’.

When I began wanting to write, I felt insignificant and unoriginal – I felt I could only, maybe, after engaging for a long time in T.S.Eliot’s ‘great labour’, stand the slightest chance of making a contribution – and as far as knowledge went, that was what other older or dead writers had and I entirely lacked.

I’m assuming you might feel something like the same thing (in reference to a significant original contribution to knowledge).

Why is Althusser’s For Marx important to me, then? And how might it be useful for you?

For Marx is a formative book for me, although I discovered it quite late. Perhaps fifteen years ago. Althusser’s argument about Young Marx’s development into the Marx of Capital seemed to me, when I read it, perhaps the most brilliant exposition of critical thinking that I had ever encountered. It made me finally understand what critical thinking is.

More than this, to see all those complex questions of self-relexivity and self-origin stated so clearly, and not on my own territory was a great relief – and was something I could go back to when I wanted to think about thinking about thinking or, in Marxist terms, reconciling theory and practice into a praxis. In order to write, I needed to write in a way that didn’t contradict what I was writing. (It’s easy to decide on a vivid thesis, then literally execute it.)

What I mean by critical thinking is self-reflexive thinking within a materialist historical context. It seems to me that this is where all critical thinking – on a day to day basis, and I mean for you, in the library or on the bus – this is where critical thinking becomes difficult and painful and, very frequently, starts to seem incommensurable.

Critical thinking is, as Althusser says, thinking that is ‘capable of accounting for itself, by taking itself as its own object’.

I don’t write philosophy. The thinking I do has – most of the time – to manifest itself through fiction. It’s only in the last thing I’ve published, a novel called Patience, that I feel I’ve managed to get some of this thought into shape for more than a few pages.

Where For Marx might be directly useful for you, I hope, is as a way of thinking about your own thinking. Marxism may not be your ideological start point; but if you are considering ideological start points at all, you are engaging with Marx.

(This may not be where you are. Audre Lorde, in ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, asked, ‘What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?’ Whether or not Althusser is still employable, I leave to you.)

To demonstrate where I find him close to home, I’m going to come in half way through a key paragraph; one that should be read and reread in its entirety. It’s from the end of  ‘Introduction: Today’”

..that the precondition of a reading of Marx is a Marxist theory of the differential nature of theoretical formations and their history, that is, a theory of epistemological history, which is Marxist philosophy itself; that this operation in itself constitutes an indispensible circle in which the application of Marxist theory to Marx himself appears to be the absolute precondition of an understanding of Marx and at the same time as the precondition even of the constitution and development of Marxist philosophy, so much is clear. But the circle implied by this operation is, like all circles of this kind, simply the dialectical circle of the question asked of an object as to its nature, on the basis of a theoretical problematic which in putting its object to the test puts itself to the test of its object. That Marxism can and must itself be the object of the epistemological question, that this epistemological question can only be asked as a function of the Marxist theoretical problematic, that is necessity itself for a theory which defines itself dialectically, not merely as a science of history (historical materialism) but also and simultaneously as a philosophy, a philosophy that is capable of accounting for the nature of theoretical formations and their history, and therefore capable of accounting for itself, by taking itself as its own object.

For almost all of this long paragraph, I would say, ‘Marxist theory’ could be replaced by ‘Feminist theory’ or ‘Queer theory’ – for example, ‘that the precondition of a reading of Queer theory is a Queer theory of the differential nature of theoretical formations and their history, that is, a Queer theory of epistemological history, which is Queer philosophy itself’. If there are some stresses within this as a statement, I think they are useful in revealing the ambitions and limits of non-Marxist philosophies.

As a final point, where this has led me is into a wider reading of self-origins as they relate to originality. I have attached a bibliography to the sheet of quotes, which you might find useful. But the main place this line of inquiry has led me, the main questionable books I have been concentrating on – the main examples I can give of this kind of thinking-in-writing by a live human subject for a life human subject, the form of which is not in contradiction to, or merely an ex post facto codification of, the liveness of its thought is Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy [of the Event] and Dogens’ Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I’ve written this decade

King Death

Life-Like

Lilian’s Spell Book

(My Mother’s Seven Spirits Demand Justice)

Notes for a Young Gentleman

(O: Short Stories)

Patience

 

Mutants

Wrestliana

 

Dead Boy Detectives Vol 1: Schoolboy Terrors

Dead Boy Detectives Vol 2: Ghost Snow

Free Country: A Tale of the Children’s Crusade

 

Vastation (opera) with Samy Moussa

Toby (album) with True Bypass

befalling (album) with Emily Hall and Mara Carlyle

Life Cycle (song cycle) with Emily Hall and Mara Carlyle

Rest (requiem) with Lady Maisery and Emily Hall

Itch-Witch (children’s opera) with Emily Hall

 

 

 

Writing and Shit – part 25 – Hip-speak and and stuttering

Pushing further away from expositional dialogue, we come to what I call ‘hip’ dialogue.

Hip-speech is a version of slang, similar to criminal slang – it is a way of communicating without fear of being overheard and understood.

The jazz musician Lester Young came up with or popularized a lot of hip language – language that was later taken over by the Beats, then the hippies and then by everyone.

‘Cool…’

‘Yeah, man…’

‘That knocks me out…’

‘That sends me…’

What hip speak says is Y’know what I mean or You get me. And it is usually used because the speaker is already sure that the listener does know and does get.

The effect of this on the page is, for the reader, slightly alienating to begin with. The reader doesn’t know exactly what one person means by what they are saying to another person – because every word chosen is intended not for an outsider but an insider.

(Later on, when the reader has learned what the hip words mean, understanding gives them a powerful feeling of inclusion.)

All forms of hip language are addressed by one person who is in the know to another equally or perhaps just a little bit less in the know.

If you are writing this way, you are crediting the reader with the ability to overhear, to retain and to triangulate meanings that aren’t given directly in an expository way.

RE-UP

TV aside: Think of the dialogue in The Wire. Think of ‘re-up’. For some viewers, this was language they recognized – perhaps they used it every day, or perhaps it was already, as far as they were concerned, comically out-of-date. But for many viewers, they had to learn a lot of new words by putting this conversation over here together with that exchange over there.

I admit, I often watched with the subtitles on, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. There are no subtitles in real life. They have no equivalent in fiction, apart from the reading doing some googling for themselves, but the heaviest form of exposition would be a glossary at the back of the book.

Literary aside: Junot Díaz included a glossary of Dominican Republic slang at the back of his first book of short stories, Drown. It is bizarrely incomplete. I’ve never worked out why.

Have more confidence in your reader. Leave gaps, and trust your reader to fill them in for you.

No gaps equals no story.

THE STUTTER OF OH FUCK IT

One thing to remember about dialogue is that different people speak in different ways to different people at different times.

A man in a pub after a few pints is very different to the same man in the elevator with his work colleagues, or speaking at the funeral of a friend.

Distinguishing speakers on the page can be troublesome. The cheapest way to do it is to dole out regional accents, speech impediments and verbal tics to all the minor people. Then, every time we see st-st-st, we know it’s so-and-so. Major people will tend to have more average speech.

The more subtle way to do different speakers is to convey everything through syntax – that is, the particular order of the words they use to say something. This will be flexible, depending on the context in which they find themselves.

Even simpler, as an approach, is to make the power relations clear. Who is top dog in the scene? If one top dog is giving another orders or instructions, and the underdog is essentially agreeing and asking for clarification, it will be perfectly clear who is  speaking even if they use exactly the same syntax, pronunciation, everything.

‘We go to the swamp.’

‘We go to the swamp.’

‘We locate our mother.’

‘We locate our mother, yes.’

But I’ve got slightly ahead of myself by mentioning top dog.

 

Writing and Shit – part 24 – What the hell is exposition?

Writers are usually much better at spotting, and mocking, exposition in the work of other writers. In their own work, sections of disguised address to the reader (a.k.a. info-dump) are simply jobs that have to be done, one way or the other.

It is a truth of writing that sometimes the ugly way is the only way. But that’s no excuse.

CASTLING KINGSIDE

Some of Shakespeare’s plays begin with real clunkers.

I don’t want to quote from any particular play, because I don’t want you to get fussed about interpreting it. So, I have made up my own couple of opening lines.

Act One, Scene One: The drawbridge of a fine castle in Venice/Padua/Bohemia

Lord #1: I hear the King has late arriv’d from France.

Lord #2: Methought he bided yet another week.

Now, if you are in an Elizabethan castle where the King is away, it is quiet, rooms are shut up, the kitchens gently tick over, flags don’t fly.

If you are in a castle – or even on the drawbridge of a castle – where the servants have been alerted to the King’s return, the entire place is in a huge panic, rooms are being aired, game is being brought in to the pantry, flags fly.

Are we supposed to believe that Lord #2 has been resident in the castle all this time and has failed to notice all the preparations for the King’s return? Or that Lord #1, with the royal flag flying above his very head, feels that it is necessary to inform Lord #2 that the King is back?

It’s like a man, soaked by a downpour, telling another man, equally wet, ‘I think it might possibly rain today.’

Who are Lord #1 and Lord #2 addressing?

The audience, of course. Shakespeare (my made-up Shakespeare) is taking Route One to informing the audience of the overall situation: the King is in, okay?

THAT I HAVE SHOT MINE ARROW O’ER THE HOUSE

When you are writing dialogue, you should imagine each word being an arrow, fired towards the person who will learn most from what’s being said.

If that arrow, instead of flying across to another fictional person, heads vertically out of the page and hits the reader – cut the line.

If a series of arrows fly upwards, sentence after useful and informative sentence, cut the scene, start again with something that doesn’t need to happen but that seems like it might.

(I will admit, some genres are more tolerant of exposition than others. Maybe you’re writing in one of those. Even so, cut first; replace if you can see no better option)

Exposition is like a news report, laying out the facts of the situation so far as they are currently known.

Exposition says, This is how the world is.

Who knows how the world is?

Here’s a fact: It is far easier to include exposition unobtrusively in a third person omniscient story than in a first person story – particularly if the first person voice that’s being used sticks very close to the character in the moment.

THIS NOVEL CHANGED WHAT I SEE ON CREATIVE WRITING COURSES

Literary Aside: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is a brilliant example of a point of view novel, one that makes a virtue out of the difficulty of going from first person present tense to any kind of statement This is how the world is.

Katniss Everdene spends most of the trilogy in ignorance both of what is happening elsewhere in Panem, and also in ignorance of her own central importance to those events. She is a revolutionary leader who doesn’t know there is a revolution going on. Change The Hunger Games into a third person omniscient novel, and Katniss becomes a comic character. She does most of what she does right by mistake, not in any full knowledge of the wider consequences.

If you watch the film, you will see that the writers and director decided they couldn’t do the whole thing through Catniss’ eyes. And so we get behind-the-curtain scenes (of exposition) with President Snow which mainly go like this, Ha ha ha, evil plot, evil plot against Katniss. In the books, we only see the consequences of the plotting – and it therefore comes as a complete surprise.

Another round of Hunger Games? You’re fucking kidding me.

Exercise: Rewrite the not-Shakespeare scene, in prose, to convey the information that the King has returned to the castle, but do it in a way that completely avoids exposition. No need for more than a couple of lines.

Explanation: What does Lord #1 need to say to Lord #2 about the King’s return, and the disturbance it has caused, that Lord #1 has an emotional reason for saying and that Lord #2 does not already know.

A definition: If expositional dialogue is useful information, non-expositional dialogue is apparently useless attitude.

Exposition says, This is how the world is; non-exposition says, My bit of the world looks and sounds and smells and feels like this to me, and it makes me feel…

Often, when the writer is getting them to do exposition, people will speak with an authority they don’t have. Their tone will go from informal to formal. The effect, if done badly, will be unintentionally comic.

See: Basil Exposition in the Mike Myers’ movie Austin Powers.

His first line is, ‘Hello, Austin. I’m Basil Exposition…’ This itself is exposition. How can Austin not already know who Basil is? Look at the direction the arrow is flying in. Straight towards you, the viewer.

PITMAN

One further thing, people who have known one another for a long time, as friends or colleagues, tend to develop shorthand or offhand ways of referring to things.

It’s quite possible that one person within a long-lasting marriage might say to the other, ‘Can you fetch me the thingummy from behind the whatsit?’ They might say this, and immediately be 100% understood.

Similarly, if technicians are using a piece of equipment like the Hadron Large Particle Collider, they do not – when they’re speaking to one another – bother to come out with all those gnarly syllables every time. They make up a nickname that works in the mouth, and they stick to it. The Zinger, the Ringer, Haddy – I don’t know what it is… Maybe you do.

Exercise: Go back to your story-start. Insert four lines of non-expositional dialogue somewhere in it – even if it seems completely useless right now. Put in something the main goal of which is to suggest the people had lives before the story started.

See you soon.

Writing and Shit – part 23 – How to Write Really Bad Dialogue

Patience – half price

Galley Beggar are offering my novel Patience for £5 until the end of this week –

https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/patience

This is the trade paperback, not the limited edition.

There won’t be a better chance to pick it up.