Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "writing"

Yes, I am a bad blogger. Hopeless. Grade Zed - no, even worse than that, grade unter-Zed. Somewhere else I started a blog, did an entry, and then half-pie another one, and then quit. So I kind of think this one is likely to be similar, but who knows? Maybe I will be so energised by the high-quality responses from people who read this, that it will run and run. That would be nice.

What I'd like to write is about writing - to me, I think writers may enjoy writing, and may earn money and thrills and fun and fame from it, but that ultimately, in their heart of hearts, they write because they have to. At any rate, that is why I write. Yes, I do get pleasure from it. Sometimes I have got goosebumps as I've written especially thrilling passages; tears have come to my eyes, even on repeated readings, of other bits, and on the few occasions I've written something meant to be funny, I've smiled again, and again. All those things are true, and good, and help make writing worthwhile.

Ultimately though, I write because I feel compelled to write - a compulsion. It's been in me since I was reasonably young, a teenager, and while I've been in the writing game professionally for more than twenty-five years, before that I kept starting things and trying other things...and I don't imagine my experience is at all strange.

Naturally I would like it if my compulsion ah compelled readers to read my stuff. Like any writer, I want to be read. I think I have things to say that are worth saying, worth reading and worth thinking about. All my books are in some sense intellectual thrillers, even if they are all different: they are "novels of ideas", and the ideas that underlie and inform them are what I would like readers to find most interesting about them.

That's not for everybody. Nor is the sex and violence that percolate through the prose. I enjoy writing that stuff, and would like every reader to enjoy reading it too, along with everything in my books. But I know that as with the ideas, some people just don't want to know.

For example, Demented, which is largely set in a dementia unit in an old people's home, offended some readers because the reality of the setting involved people who were incontinent. I thought that feature an important part of the novel: the reality of what it is like to suffer from dementia and what it is like to care for people who suffer from it. One reader said, "Give me a break!" Another said, "Too much of poohs." But a third, who had worked in such a place, said, "You got what it's like perfectly." So while I "lost" in this count two to one, to me, I won: "perfectly" from one who knows.

The thing that gets me down the most, however, is not resistance to things like this - after all no one has to like what I write - but missing the point altogether. My novel The Kleiber Monster is partly about the truth that most old people are women, typically widowed, and suggests, admittedly obliquely, that they should not moulder alone in their houses once their husbands die, but should buddy up with other women, not just as flatmates either. The idea was to raise this idea without beating people over the head with it, and while some readers got it immediately (one professional reader said, "Yes. Octogenerian lesbian sex") others just saw another aspect of this relationship, and missed the underlying point. Bad writing, Steve, is my conclusion. But maybe I am being unfair to myself.

However I am hardly setting the world on fire at the mo.

Meanwhile I am writing another one. I just can't help it. It's my ninth novel though I have put only five on the net as e-books. I'm enjoying writing it. It's different from the others, but the same too. Maybe it'll be the one that cracks it for me, and people will go back to the others and find all the richness presently hidden from them!

Well, that's me. If you have got this far, five stars! You don't care about the stars, do you? Not to worry.

This is post number three in my series about writing (mainly). One of the things that has held me back from blogging has been my desire to concentrate on writing novels and not get caught up in the online netscape with its endlessly voracious hunger for ever more. But it seems that if one is an "indy author" who publishes via the net, "extras" like olives and pepperoni really are needed for making this narrow slice of intellectual pizza scrumptious for the all-too-discerning public. You want them to eat your pizza? You attract them with olives. And maybe pepperoni. They get it that there is always cheese (and in my case heaps of it) and tomato sauce. Mushrooms. Yo! Anchovies? Well, to tell the truth, I am not at all sure about anchovies though they are definitely desirable to certain classes of the human species. See below.

Anyway it's fun, this. It's an opportunity to be playful when novel writing is pretty serious business, even if one is trying to be funny. Novelising is pretty structured, though one can build in some deconstructive elements that allow wild careenings, and my present opus has just now hared off into a direction I had briefly considered before starting, but thought I'd dropped. But no. It's back, and it's mean!

Partly this relates to sex. My books typically have a reasonable amount of sex; I like it, think other people like it, and have something to say about it: I'm a sort of Reichian about sex (Wilhelm, not Third), and to me that means acknowledging people's interest and dealing with it positively and hopefully anyway not just erotically but also intellectually. My that was a long sentence.

But before I put finger to keyboard on my first book, I thought about how I was going to handle this potentially explosive topic, and worked out a standard: that whatever I wrote it should be at least in principle erotic to women. I reckon that's a good way to be, and it's helped me through my books since the first one in 1999.

In that time though, things have changed. Fifty-zillion shades of grey later, it seems what's erotic to women extends well past what I thought it ever would, and I'm not sure of what that means, at all. Put into my pizza metaphor, anchovies are in! S & M is not my own cup of tea, but it turns out that many women like both initials. A male friend who is into it has tried, without my taking part, to explain to me what it's all about, and I've watched some DVDs that had me killing myself and cringing in embarrassment for those involved, but not in the slightest bit aroused. One of these, made in England on the sly, had a gentleman tethered by a nipple to a chain his "mistress" yanked from time to time to keep him whining and mewling, dragged him out onto a driveway, urinated, and forced him to lick the pebbles. ??? Well, whatever turns you on...it did for me what the Young Ones television series did. I was howling with laughter till it got too repetitive, and hence boring.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for this kind of sexual encounter, I'm still trying to learn about these evidently ever-enlarging, elastic boundaries, about what is acceptable in male and female imaginations, in their erotic fantasies. My aim is to excite and liberate, not offend. Sex in fiction that leads to serious violence just makes me shiver, as it would in real life, and I think even if it becomes de rigeur, I'll stay old-fashioned. But others, like so-called "water sports"...well, maybe...still thinking about this. If you have thoughts on your pizza preferences, drop me a line: how salty do you like your anchovies?

A five star epic. Go on, reward yourself. You know you want to.

This blog is about writing and this is the twenty-fifth post, twenty-sixth if you count the “blog hop” immediately preceding this one on wordpress, which I am not really. Twenty-five is roughly twenty-four more than I thought I’d manage to finish, so it is something of a milestone for me if for no one else. There are people with blogs who seem to write a dozen a week or even more, and many of these are thoughtful and creative. So I am but a tyro.

Till now, what I’ve mainly tried to do is discuss the people and ideas shaping my thinking as I’ve gone about writing my books. To my surprise this has been fun most of the time, and the process has helped clarify what I had previously imagined was already clear. This may explain why I have kept going far beyond what I thought I could do.

The previous post was again about Celine, the French writer whose three “pamphlets” containing anti-semitic themes ostracised the once-lion of twentieth century literature. It was a hard post to write, and though it is ok, I was far from happy with it when I admitted defeat and pressed the “publish” button.

Partly this stemmed from the many ideas I got while writing it – ideas that went in and out of the text not seldom, about writing, about why people write, and why people read, especially fiction, and how those feed into more fundamental questions about life as it “really is”. There are not surprisingly relationships there that run deep and give complexity a good name. As a writer, I can probe my own motivations and confess that I write because I need to – because I feel compelled to do it, even if that is not entirely satisfactory as an answer: there is a question implicitly raised by it (“All right, why are you compelled?”) that no amount of soul-searching may satisfy…. Anyway it is true I’ll write till I die or at least am no longer physically capable, whether people read my books or not. Readers are by contrast not compelled – they don’t have to read (or I don’t think so). There is moreover a great range of means to satisfy whatever urges they might have – escape, or knowledge for example: films, television, games.* Fiction – the novel – is not guaranteed an audience.

The novel is a relatively recent phenomenon; that is presumably why it is called a novel. It is true that there are traces of fiction in western civilisation going back a long way – to Aesop I suppose, and beyond, if we consider fiction to have its roots in fable and myth. Asian civilisation had novels, or what nowadays pass for novels, for a very long time before the novel became an established form in the west: Monkey in China, and Tale of Genji in Japan, for example.

The novel in the west really began in the 18th century and didn’t become a wild success till the 19th. Yes there were novels in Shakespeare’s time – Greene’s Pandosto was the model for The Winter’s Tale – but unless one is a specialist, no one today goes near them. Before that there were “tales” – by Boccaccio, Chaucer and others. But we are really, as readers and writers, following conventions shaped with Fielding and Defoe and their kin and codified, embellished and expanded by a large number of 19th century masters – Austen, Balzac, Dickens…A great deal of this has to do with technological advance, and the sudden availability of cheap magazines and books, and with the literacy that went with it. Where in 1600 the way to reach a wide public was on the stage, by the mid-19th century at the latest the printed book had become a mobile theatre, available wherever you happened to be, whenever you happened to want to crack it.

Talking like this risks Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concresence” – explaining the history of human thought by materialism. It’s not like that at all. Reading is the most complicated skill humans typically possess, but why they read is different, especially as I think people read novels for the ideas in them, even if they don’t recognise that is why they do it. Fiction is morality writ fab – and “morality” is really philosophy. All fiction, whether it is genre fiction or not, is a kind of philosophical treatise.** The process of “reasoning” is presented as a dramatic process, a commentary on life that is at bottom philosophical, even by definition philosophical. In terms of the novel most “how-to” fiction-writing books will advise authors to have a “premise” before starting to write: a philosophical proposition, though few would consciously acknowledge this. A novel’s premise doesn’t have to be a statement for all time about everything, just for the novel itself. Nonetheless, it is a form of philosophy. The premise for Kaos, the novel I am writing and finding hard going at the moment, is “The road to hell is paved with fun”. Plainly, this is not true all of the time, or perhaps even very often: but in this particular book it is true because the “author as god” (me) decrees it.

When this occurred to me, this idea of the novelist as philosopher, whether s/he likes it or not, it was a bit embarrassing. The thought “You mean you’ve only just realised this, as you work on your eighth novel?” jostled with “You mean the author of a cheap trashy romance, say in the Mills & Boon class, is a philosopher?” The answer to both these questions is yes and no.

Naturally, I have regarded my own work as something beyond Mills & Boon, and I have thought of my books as “novels of ideas” – as in the post about “wit”, I have always had a serious purpose, “something to say”. But the notion that every writer including every trashy romance or hard core porn author is by definition a kind of philosopher is very appealing to me, humbling and exalting at the same time.

Put this way, it is so obvious you’d think it scarcely needs saying – but it does. The other day I picked up a book by a man named G Wilson Knight, a Shakespeare scholar, who in 1930 rocked that narrow slice of intellectual landscape with a book whose title came from Lear, The Wheel of Fire. Knight seems to have been provoked into writing what is now a classic of Shakespearian interpretation by a trend disowning any philosophical notion in Shakespeare; he found himself criticised for regarding Shakespeare as a “philosophical poet rather than a man of the stage”. Knight’s spirited rejoinder was that he was a philosophical poet who was a man of the stage and that he would not be performed today if he were not.

Shakespeare may have been the greatest writer in history, but he is not set apart as a philosophical poet: what is surprising to me, having gone through this in my mind, is that Knight’s point had to be argued at all. Yet it did.

Wait! There’s more!

Putting the idea of “novel as philosophy” together with Wittgenstein, and the idea of philosophy as language makes a very neat fit. Beyond the rules of our language that all speakers and writers follow, the “language games” that comprise the rules in linguistic philosophy as I understand Wittgenstein to mean it, are in genre novels such as the thriller which I have been writing, set by the genre. The writer has to adhere to these on one level at least to provide the satisfaction readers want. Breaking those rules makes for failure. Shakespeare, my own primary model in writing, dragged playgoers in to spend their coppers by keeping to the rules of the kinds of drama he wrote – but by providing something more at the same time. In my writing, that has always been my aim.

Yet genre fiction imposes requirements that can exhaust the moral force of a writer, and turn what s/he writes into a commodity, indistinguishable from others of its type, be it romance, thriller, police procedural or whatever. Any reader who has not encountered fiction like this has led – well, has read – a golden life.

The question for me, that was raised in me by Celine’s Bagatelles was how much I had allowed the rules of genre to impose on me, whether I had blunted or even thwarted my purposes by consciously choosing a genre and sticking too slavishly to “the rules”.

I have now written eight novels. Five of them are “published” via smashwords and three lie a-mouldering in my “bottom drawer” for different reasons. What reading Bagatelles provoked in me more than anything was the thought that perhaps I have exhausted my ability to conform to the genre rules and that I must either break them, find another genre, or break free, if I am to succeed as I wish to succeed: to reach people with messages that challenge and move them, that make their lives more enjoyable, more interesting, more fulfilling, more fun.

There is, of course, only one Celine. He broke lots of rules; some of his transgressions, as we know, made him a major literary force while others shrivelled him up to at best a minor figure, a curiosity.***

Even so, he presents challenges to all writers: “first you’ve got to pay for it, then you can use it”.

Of course there many ways writers can use their life experiences to “inform” their writing. Not every novel has to be autobiographical. What evidence there is suggests Celine held genre writing in contempt^, but as I’ve discussed on this blog in the past, writers can imaginatively encounter experiences one would never dream of having in real life, or at least should not – like murder.

“In the future you’ll telegraph or you won’t write at all.”

Celine laughed at his use of the ellipse and other punctuation though he was probably being ironic, at least a little bit. But there is more to this: According to his theory of writing the richly evocative descriptive passage was finished: people are too busy. Yet there are ways and ways, as one of his translators noted. Take this description of a suburban sub-division:

“Not a one that can stand up right…A collection of toys plunked down in the shit!”

Two little sentences (admittedly preceded by some other description) that sum up the emergent mania for suburbia at the end of the Belle Epoque in France – anything for that villa! The cynical perspective of the observer, who cannot see the mud as a future lawn or garden (or even paved road), who notices the poor construction standards and the miniaturisation of floor space to make these contraptions affordable…there is even more there, in his contempt – resentment, as anyone who reads the book concerned (Mort a Credit [Death on the Instalment Plan]) will know: the engagement by the author is an engagement of emotion. Is it the description, or the emotion, that is the point? It turns out to be both.

My plan now – yes, I have a plan – is to try to adjust what I am doing to this approach, which involves rethinking Dostoevsky as well as rethinking me. That really calls for another post as this one has gone on long enough. Dear reader, your perseverance and good humour means so much! Thank you…

*Certainly there is a great range of pastimes available to us all; what I am getting at here is “brain fodder”.

** The same is true of any made-up story, whether presented as film, on the stage, etc.

***Milton Hindus, a would-be supporter when Celine was in exile in Denmark and who visited him there, wrote a (not very good) book on his experience with the apt title Crippled Giant.

^As a doctor Celine might have been expected to find medical novels interesting; he said they bored him.

Dear reader -

Have you ever tried typing with your elbows? This is what happens when writers “finish” something and put it out for criticism by specially nominated “readers” who are typically very busy people, caught up in the whirl of daily life: earning, spending, loving, hating, all that stuff. These readers may be writers themselves trying to keep their minds on what they’re working on. Others may be struggling to keep their heads above water and if the work in question is fiction, don’t have time for make believe, or if it’s not, don’t have time for another world, however real it may be.

So a writer who has put a work out into this strange half-lit limbo world – sometimes called “beta” but which might just as appropriately be termed “waita” – waiting for the word, starts at the fingernails, and in a little while, is down to the wrists and then, nibble by nibble, pacing the floor or the yard or the cosmos, arrives at the elbows. Even the most confident writer occasionally gets a feeling for this, banging away at the keyboard, splashing splodges of letters and painfully, carefully removing the unwanted ones, while she or he waits and waits and waits…

As you are certainly by now aware, that is the place I am living in. This post is metaphorically hammered out using my elbows as I await the judgment of two readers on my latest epic, Kaos.

The reason the opinion of good readers matters, to any writer, is that however hard a writer tries, it is impossible to get “outside” one’s work enough to have a totally objective view of it. There are ways to approach objectivity, including if necessary simply putting a work away for a lengthy period and coming back at it “cold”, but none I know of really does the job. The trouble is, the writer knows what comes next, and knowing that sucks tension away.

This is to the writer’s advantage. What seems dull after forty or fifty runs-through simply can’t be as dull on first reading. But there are other problems with familiarity that are not so kind and that repeated readings may not pick up, from ill-constructed sentences with clauses rubbing each other the wrong way, to paragraphs whose sentences similarly need reordering, to blatant nonsense, and beyond: none of this may be present in a manuscript, yet it can nonetheless be boring as.

Kaos is not quite finished in the “tweaking” sense, but is near. It’s taken me a while to write – the first instalment of this blog talks about it, and it wasn’t new then – and its title is appropriate for how my life seems to run.

But I am not sure about it, not sure if this book is any good at all, if it is worth tweaking. Normally I am quite excited when I finish a book, and think it is much better than it turns out to be in the eyes of other beholders. This time – I don’t know. Certainly I get tingles in many places, and there are times when I see some bit of description or action and sit back gobsmacked – “I wrote that! Really! Wow!” But there are other times when I think, “I am too much ‘inside’ of this book to judge it at all as a whole.” It doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily bad but that I just don’t know. The advice I give to other writers, to have a reader on the shoulder, is all too apposite for me. But while I’ve tried to do this, and know that at least every sentence really does make sense, and that the book has a beginning, a middle and an end and moreover, that all relate to each other – whether it’s a bore or not eludes me, so far.

I do think that in a few spots it gets bogged down, and if my readers approve of it, in successive reads I’ll smooth these over so readers can avoid this swamp, but these are not vital and can be fixed, I think, with a bit of glue and tissue paper – or bog roll.

Kaos follows the mantra I’ve kept at since I first started out as a novelist: “a serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Of course I would like every single person on the planet to read my books, but if that can’t be so – and very, very grudgingly, under extreme pressure, I may admit it – then it would be great if thriller lovers the world over tore through my pages, and that many of them got something out of them beyond use as emergency loo paper: fun, a “good reading experience”, and something more, some insight or other that they didn’t have about life, the universe and ablosutely everything in it.

Compared to The Russian Idea, my previous book in writing terms, I have peeled back the philosophy, if it can be called that. But I think about every writer’s nightmare and envy, Dan Brown, whose new book, Inferno, was already satirised before it hit the shops. He could be said to have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre too, and his books sell and sell and sell.

It is very easy to laugh at Dan Brown, so people do, and that includes me. Michael Deacon of the Telegraph did a pre-release send-up of him that is a scream. But some of that laughter, when it comes from writers or would be writers, is based on envy. Well, I’m not envious of his success – whether he deserves it or not, he’s got it. But I wouldn’t mind also…even if I, also, don’t deserve it. Life is just inherently unfair. And it may be that sometimes people who don’t deserve something good that they get for one reason, do deserve something good for some other reason. Dan Brown for example may be a very nice chap who has always been a nice chap, and who has given away lots of money even when he didn’t have much, who helped his neighbours when they were skint and who has always had an eye out for cats up trees and little old ladies who can’t see properly trying to navigate their ways across busy roads.

For just such a person there was a 1950s American television programme, The Millionaire*, about a philanthropist who picked out the otherwise invisible worthies and gave them a million dollars each. “My name is Michael Anthony and I’m here to give you a million dollars” his man would say to the disbelieving beneficiary. J Beresford Tipton, the philanthropist, is sadly not a real person. I would like to emulate him nonetheless, and if the enabling gains are undeserved, well, what goes around etc.

Meanwhile I am waiting for my test audience to come back to me, to say yea or nay. Do I detect “Nay”? Maybe…but it’s a good story, so if they don’t like it, I can have another slash at making it better. If I have to do it, I can just drop it for now, go on to something new, and go back to it later, when I have got some “distance”.

Those of you with a cruel turn of mind may wonder why I have stopped at my elbows. Why not typing with one’s shoulders? Ultimately,with the nose, and when that’s not available, the earlobe? The totally cruel may ask if I wrote Kaos with another part of my anatomy.

I’m not telling.

Thanks for reading.

* See Wiki for details.

After celebrating having a blog that lasted an entire year, producing the next post has turned out to be a struggle, so much so that I think I could be a comic book character with a lycra suit I could never quite get into or take off, yet as I pull and twist, hop from one foot to another, wriggle and writhe, somehow save civilisation, only to be landed with a lawsuit for trampling someone’s flower bed…Yes, things are grim.

The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.

Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!

Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.

Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.

But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.

Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.

But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.

And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.

There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.

So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.

And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.

And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…

*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.

Kaos is the ninth novel I’ve written and the seventh I’ve “e-published”. Two others remain in the bottom drawer so to speak. As I wrote, it kept occurring to me that other writers, and those curious about writing, might be interested in the process as one writer has done it. It’s not really my idea that people will go on to read the book though of course more readers are always welcome. There will not be any “spoilers” but this is about writing, not marketing – “telling not selling”.

The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.

The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.

Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.

Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.

The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.

One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.

The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.

Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.

Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.

Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!

Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.

The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.

Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.

* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.

** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.

*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.

**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.

^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.

^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.

A long time ago, I was approached by a writer who asked if it would be ok if she based a character in her young adult novel on me. Of course I said yes, though I had no idea how “I” would be portrayed. She didn’t do me wrong; as it worked out the character was only superficially about “me” anyway but even if she had made “me” out to be a villain, I would not have complained.

The thing is, she asked.

I also have a fat book that identifies who the characters in famous novels “really are”*. And I am sure that in many, even most, cases, the authors didn’t ask. This can be risky actually – the proviso in the front of most novels that they are works of fiction and that similarity to any persons, living or dead, is coincidental, is no defence in itself. Australian novelist Frank Hardy was prosecuted for criminal libel over his novel Power without glory, though he was acquitted.

When I started writing fiction, I decided that I would never base a single character on a single person, not so much for legal reasons as for personal ones: it just didn’t (and doesn’t) seem fair, even if the character is portrayed favourably. Yet I haven’t just made them up from thin air. My characters have emerged into fictional life courtesy of a number of people, even different aspects – physical, temperamental, interests etc – are often amalgams from people I know or have seen. This has not been easy to do, and critics might complain that it makes the characters inevitably artificial. As I write in a ”sub-literary” genre this is inevitable to some degree anyway: it is part of the definition of the genre, or of any genre

Just lately, however, I have been thinking about writing a novel that is perhaps outside my usual “thriller” genre, and could even qualify as so-called “serious” literature. This is shameful on my part really – in my opinion the trouble with modern fiction, the thing that sets it outside the reading habits of most people, is precisely that it is “serious”. There is a literature in control of “serious” people whose elitist notions of what is good can squeeze out what is really good storytelling. Successful writers “don’t count” because they write “genre”. Well, I write genre and am not successful, so don’t count twice! But I would rather be read and enjoyed by many people than critically acclaimed and read only by a few. Anyone reading this blog should know that my aim has always been to square the circle of popularity and “serious intent” and one of my sayings about my writing, dreamed up for this, is that I have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre. But that too is unfair as it is only frivolous to those who sneer at it.

Anyway the central character of this novel would be drawn much more from life than any of my other previous characters: I am thinking about this, both as a moral issue (is this ok?) and an artistic one (can I do it successfully?). Of course I can write it, and if it doesn’t work, just shelve it as I have one of my other books.

One of the things I’m interested in with this particular idea is that it breaks the boundary between life and death. The initial flash of inspiration was of a person talking to another person across this boundary, only to see it dissolve in a very direct and surprising way. That’s the first page taken care of (joke). As I have written earlier in this blog this isn’t entirely new even among so-called serious writers. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo dies in the middle of his novel yet continues to play a part in the action. B Traven’s "The night visitor", a story the German wrote in Spanish, also features a dead person coming to life. I am sure there are many others, The lovely bones being a famous one I’ve never read.

To wander outside one’s genre can be both thrilling and scary. Before beginning to write thrillers I read hundreds of them, to get “how they work” into my unconscious so as to be able to make my own work. But to be honest, if there i a “dead as live” genre that is not about vampires, and I would not be surprised at all if there is, I’m not really all that interested in it. I’m just interested in this one idea, that I would like to write.

But maybe it’s time to shake some dust from my heels and head out yonder, where grizzlies roam and coyotes howl…

*This is The Originals – Who’s really Who in Fiction by William Amos. My paperback (Sphere) is dated 1985.

A few months back I ran into someone on a bus in Glasgow I’d known long before, Duncan MacGillivray. Duncan is an artist, a real one. He has a degree in ceramics from a university in Dundee, but has since got keen on printmaking, specifically lithography. He etches steel plates and then hand-colours them to produce mostly one-off prints. They are pretty good, I reckon, so if you ever happen to be in Glasgow - or indeed happen to be in Glasgow right now - you can stop by the Glasgow Print Studio near the Trongate and ask to see some of his stuff, which is kept in the collection and is for sale.

The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.

To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.

Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.

Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.

Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.

Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.

Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.

When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.

The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.

This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.

That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.

Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.

That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.

But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.

I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.

So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.

And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.

So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.

Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.

* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.

** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.

Writing is a big deal so far as I’m concerned. Nearly all my life – that is, since I could talk! – I’ve enjoyed playing with words in one way or another, and when things come out in a satisfying way the pleasure can be physical as well as emotional or, if you like – I do – spiritual. But when they don’t come out right, and I know it, it can be maddening.

The most recent post in this blog, “Toiling with Troilus”, was in the hard basket for a long time and I thought it might even be too hard. Quite a number of drafts were ripped into shreds and then torn into tiny pieces before being dumped down my literary loo, a new low in “bog standard”. When I finally stuck it up on the net, I was relieved as well as pleased.

Now I can get on with what I am meaning to do, which is write another novel. I’ve been doing quite a lot of research for this one, which in a way is unusual for me: most of my novels have sprung out of things I was already interested in, and had found out about in the ordinary course of being curious. There are always things to find out, facts to check and so on, but the background bits, on Shakespeare or Berdyaev, or Giordano Bruno or Nazism or Celine or what- or whoever were already sitting in my feverish imagination before I thought of writing at all.

This one is a bit different. After Kaos I felt I had ploughed a certain furrow just about as wide and deep as it was going to get and that it was time to till somewhere new. Partly that involves the kind of book I mean to write, and partly it is what I mean to write about. Casting around for new material and new approaches has often been quite a lot of fun as I’ve let my interests find their own paths and have learned a great deal about things and people I knew little or nothing about. Hopefully the sense of wonder will translate onto the page and give readers some thrills.

But I want to get onto it, start writing, and I feel I’m not ready to do that yet, and I am beginning to find this quite annoying. Every day feels closer, but I go to bed without having put a word onto e-paper. Blagh! Once I get started it will be hard to think about anything else, so the best idea would be to stop worrying about it and enjoy the down time. But I’m not like that.

Do I have a title? Yes…maybe even more than one title. Do I have a premise? Yes…several to choose from but think I’ve settled on one. Characters? Yo…some interesting people too. Plot…welllllll, not entirely. A beginning and an end and lots of the middle but there are some wrinkles there that just won’t iron out. Double blagh!

Thanks for reading.

A few posts back I was writhing with writer’s cramp – unable to work out what I was doing wrong, and so not doing anything. Now I am more than 50,000 words along in the novel I had been trying to get my head around for months, and just for today thinking it is not tooooooo bad.

Probably not surprisingly, while I am writing I go on and off the book I am working on. Some of the time I think it is terrible. Other times I think it is ok. When I finally get it out there, I think it is pretty good actually. By then I’ll have pored over it quite a number of times, tinkering, massaging, cutting, adding, rewriting, hating myself, loving same, jumping up and down in front of the PC, rolling about on the floor moaning, smiling at my cleverness, laughing at my incompetence…the usual things a writer does in other words.

Anyway this one is both a departure for me and treading some old ground. The departure part is terrifying because it’s new to me and I am very unsure about it. The other part is terrifying because I don’t want to put readers off and for them to think that this is just all I can do. It’s not, and it just happened this way. It’s a challenge too – to do something that is not entirely unlike a book I’ve written in the past that is nonetheless fresh and absorbing.

Writers are meant to “write what they know”. It’s good advice, and most of my books have come out of my interests – people, ideas, and events I already knew about or would have found out about anyway. This is slightly different in that I did research in a few areas precisely because I wanted to put things from them into this book. It is time-consuming to do this and requires a kind of self-discipline that is different from writing or reading for pleasure: reading for knowledge is not always for pleasure and can involve wading through seemingly endless swamps composed of the most appalling sludge, fantasising desperately about dry ground. Sometimes of course it is fun.

Well, I am not at all sure that all that was really as useful as I was telling myself while enjoying the cold wet muck running into my gumboots. But I have done it, and there will be things I will do more yet. I would like, if it is at all possible, to get Bela Lugosi into my new book with the Queen and her eldest son, along with the rest of them.

Back into it.

Thanks for reading.