You Should Use This In One Of Your Books!

Anyone interested in writing should check out this brilliant blog post. Briefly, Josh, a screenwriter, describes a bizarre crime he got mixed up in and at the same time imagines pitching it as a story to a network. The point he is making is something that Nicci and I have discovered over and over again while working on our books, which is that there is a complete difference between what happens in real life and what is believable in a story. Much of what happens in the real world is simply too bizarre to work in a book or a movie, and sometimes it is too uninteresting. Also, however realistic you are being, your material has to be shaped, tweaked, turned into a story. 

Philip Larkin wrote an extraordinary letter (dated 23 December, 1978), to a woman who had sent him a novel she had written, derived from the experience of her son dying in an accident:

'...you have done amazingly well to describe what happened in so dispassionate and calm a way, but for you this is enough, the events speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the reader it isn't: the reader wants that impure thing, literature - plot, suspense, characters, ups, downs, laughter, tears, all the rest of it. Your narrative isn't a story, it's a frieze of misery; your characters are numb with unhappiness; there is no relief, no contrast. Now I can quite see that to 'play about' with the kind of subject-matter you have taken would seem heartless, frivolous, even untrue, an offence against decency or decent feelings, something you couldn't do, and yet in literature it somehow has to be done - one might almost say that it's the mixture of truth and untruth that makes literature.'

I suspect that by that date, Larkin was speaking about himself as well. His depression had taken such a hold that he was no longer capable of shaping his bleak view of life into anything more than a howl of pain.

By the way, I was steered to the above blog post by the indispensible longform.org's selection of The 10 Most Ridiculously Entertaining Reads of 2010, and if that isn't a deadly distraction from work I don't know what is.