Tag Archives: writing

10 favourite books

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There’s a meme doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment to list out your 10 favourite books. At risk of turning this into Buzzfeed I thought I’d note my choices here, mainly in the spirit of trying to reflect on what, if anything, I could glean about my own writing from my selection of reading. Other than oh-my-god-I-could-never-write-as-well-as-that, of course…

Subject to change on a whim, with a break in the weather, or depending on what I’ve just had for breakfast here are the 10:

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey. This is my all time favourite and the book that fired my entire interest in 60s counter culture in the States. From here I went back to Kerouac and forwards to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Sadly I never drove across America in a brightly painted bus with flowers in my hair but perhaps there is still time. If you know the film then you’ll know that it is a brilliant thing but the book is far richer and more nuanced. It works as a straightforward story but also allegorically to describe the entire movement Kesey was associated with: a freeing of the mind from tradition and authority. It’s very funny, deeply sad, and, by the end, redemptive and hopeful.

The Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien. Yes it’s somewhat predictable. And yes I have read many fantasy genre books since that I consider “better”. However, this is the one that opened an 11/12 year old me up to an entire genre that has given me significant pleasure and escape over the past 30 years. If there’s a fantasy closet then I’m coming out of it. Two books in and another that’s possibly now more famous for the film version which may say something about either my taste or the steady decline of Western Civilisation. Or both. Either way the films nail the scale and scope but the key to why I love this, which the books inevitably had long before Peter Jackson could speak, let alone speak Elvish, is imagination. All of that stuff. Out of one person’s head. Imagination was Tolkien’s great gift to me.

Unreliable Memoirs – Clive James. I’m not sure if the rules for this list specified works of fiction. I’m not particularly sure that Clive James took much notice of the fiction / non fiction distinction in his collection of memoirs anyway so it probably evens out. This is here simply because the man writes so beautifully; few craft a phrase as eloquently as James and few could guide you through their formative years with such humour, candour, and grace. His command of voice leaves me mildly awestruck – each page is perfectly and consistently him. This is the book that made me look at fifteen odd years’ worth of diary entries and want to chuck them all in the bin.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams. Eminently quotable, much cleverer than it’s given credit for, and extremely funny. I think, reflecting on it, that what I really like about Hitchhikers is the sheer number of ideas in it. Whilst it’s difficult to know how much ended up on the cutting room floor I like to imagine that Adams chucked everything in that was running through his head, inventing ever more complex problems for his narrative to solve. The slight cheat, of course, was that he was writing both SF and comedy so when things got too tough he could always fall back (with a knowing wink) on deus ex machina.

Generation X – Douglas Coupland. I’m instinctively wary of something that had the whole “defines a generation” tag foisted on it but this book caught me at exactly the right time. Reading it in my mid 20s it felt authentic to me at a time when I was wondering what else was. I haven’t read it since and suspect that it may not speak as loudly now as it did then albeit it’s interesting that the central premise of the book – that three disempowered friends tell each other stories as a means of expression – is one that I seem to have unconsciously processed and am vaguely channeling in this year’s writing project.

The Lions Of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay. There are a number of fantasy books (other than LOTR) that I could have picked but Kay has steadily worked his way to the top of my pile in recent years. His early work was very Tolkien-esque (relatively unsurprising given that he worked on editing some of Tolkien’s unpublished writing) but he has subsequently mined a richer seam that weaves fantasy with historical fiction. Al-Rassan is set in a parallel mediaeval Spain and chronicles a regional power struggle between various political and religious factions. The central characters are brilliant, it’s tightly plotted, lyrically written, and a fabulous exercise in world building (or, I guess, world borrowing).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera. Another book I read in my mid to late 20s and which, I think, stuck with me precisely because it was so overtly philosophical. It was probably the first time I’d encountered a style that very consciously called out the themes that the book was seeking to explore in its narrative, often directly framed to the reader almost as non fiction. I like that authorial voice speaking from the page alongside the narrative voices and I like that this is a book that is unashamedly about the big stuff: existence, love, being, life.

Stoner – John Williams. The newest book on my list in terms of when it was read. This popped up last year to a fair degree of fanfare as a “lost classic” and I picked it up whilst taking a 6 month sabbatical from work. In that sense it’s probably another case of right book at the right time given that it deals almost exclusively in reflecting on the course of a relatively ordinary life and its significance. It’s quite slow, nothing much happens, but it’s breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad.

The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald. I read it for English Literature A level. I didn’t get it. See also Pride And Prejudice. I had one teacher, a man, who taught me Arthur Miller, dystopian visions of the future, and Shakespeare. I got all that. I had another, a woman, who taught me Gatsby, Austen, and the Romantic poets. For a long time I didn’t get it all. She persevered with my immaturity and wall of rationality until, between us, we knocked it down (or, at least, took a couple of bricks out). Gatsby is magical, poetic, heady, dizzying, and, in a common theme for me, also, at its core, very sad. I love it now, just as I also learned to love Austen, and Keats, and anyone else that understood how to make your heart beat a little faster through words.

Fantastic Mr Fox – Roald Dahl. This is the one I read and read and read as a child. Reading Dahl again now, to my daughter, is a great pleasure but this was the one that I loved as a kid and probably most obviously started me off into all of the other books listed above. I also loved those Enid Blyton books about all girls’ boarding schools as a kid: not really sure what that was all about and perhaps best we let that one lie…

Tomorrow I will remember with a groan something really obvious that I’ve missed out. Let me know in the comments what your favourites are and what I’m missing out on.

Beginnings ?

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There should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, right ? That’s how stories work. So you’re probably wondering what this is ? The beginning ? The end ? Somewhere in the middle ? 

Let’s give ourselves something to work with. I’m clinging to the hand rail on the Severn Bridge, wind blowing in my face, cars rushing past behind me. Does that make this the end ? I haven’t told you on which side of that hand rail I am standing. What did you suppose ? Is this just an innocent walk from England to Wales or the prelude to a plummet into the tidal depths of the water below ?

I’m clinging to the hand rail, retching across the side of the bridge, watching flecks of my own vomit disappear, whipped in the wind, down towards the river. There’s a stationary car behind me at an angle across the carriageway, driver’s door open, headlights on. So perhaps this is the middle ? The reaction to what happened in the beginning but with somewhere still to go.

A hand on my shoulder startles me into pulling tighter on the hand rail. I look round to see a woman, her face furrowed with concern, her car pulled to an abrupt halt behind us, headlights left on to illuminate her route to me. She asks if I’m alright and I note the sadness in her eyes even as the wind wraps her long, dark hair across her face. A beginning then ? Two strangers meeting at the mercy of circumstance.

I want to tell her what happened and why I come back. Why it always leaves me like this; physically sick, violently forcing the memories back out of my body. I imagine that you want to know too. That’s how stories work, isn’t it ? If this was the end you’d already know, if it’s the middle then you’d be finding out, but if this is the beginning then you only know what I want to tell you. Perhaps I will tell her and you can listen.

I tell her that I’m okay. She frowns and I don’t blame her. I’m throwing up over the side of a bridge in the middle of the night. I’m clearly not okay. She asks me again, this time assuring me that she just wants to help. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and let go my grip on the rail with the other. Really, I tell her, I’m really okay. Just a sudden wave of nausea. Maybe vertigo. Now she starts to look annoyed. I don’t know why I bothered lying or at least I don’t know why I didn’t come up with something even half way believable.

She starts to turn away to return to her car. The bridge isn’t busy at this time but I guess she’s suddenly aware that she’s blocking up the inside lane, was in such a rush that she didn’t flick on her hazards. I take a step after her and start to speak. She looks over her shoulder and says that she’ll be back in just a minute. I watch her clamber back up to the road and walk back to her car, a featureless black silhouette in the headlights.

It’s the hazards that do it. I notice them wink on and then off and it all comes back. Lights flashing on this bridge a year ago. Lights that I could see reflected off the thousands of pieces of broken glass, the fractured remains of a windscreen. Fractured as I’d been thrown through it and onto the tarmac on that still, cold night. I thought it was the end.

And so I come back. I come back because it wasn’t the end but it won’t leave me. I am stuck in some kind of middle.

She finds me again sitting and weeping, my head buried in my knees, wrapping myself up tightly against the echoes of the accident. This time she doesn’t ask if I’m okay, she just sits beside me and puts her arm across my shoulders. I tell her about my friends and our trip to Wales. I tell her about the minibus and how I’d taken to slipping off the seatbelt when I sat in the front so that I could turn around to speak to everyone. I tell her that I should have known he was tired, that we should have done more to share the drive home. We were so close to home though. I tell her that I was thrown out when we hit the central reservation before the bus span around in the road, turned up onto its side and was ploughed into by the lorry behind us. I tell her that I only survived because I wasn’t in the bus. That’s what the police said later. They called it a miracle.

Now that you’ve listened to me telling her I guess this is the end ? This is the first time since I’ve been back that anybody stopped, the first time I haven’t stood on the bridge alone. It’s the first time that I’ve told anyone what happened. It’s the first time I’ve cried. With so many firsts perhaps this is actually the beginning ?

She still has her arm across my shoulders, that worried furrow creasing her forehead, and those sad eyes watching me with concern. I wipe my eyes clear of tears and ask her for her name.

……….

This short story is the first in a series of 42 to try to raise awareness and money for Mind, the mental health charity. Please feel free to share it if you enjoyed it. More details here:  https://www.justgiving.com/42shorts/

And I could be anything if I just put my mind to it…

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42. Glory Days – Pulp / Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen

53,000 words, 11 months, 300 or so songs, a very loose interpretation of 42 records, and here we are at the end. So what was all that about then ?

On one level it was a set of posts about some records, from Abba to Zevon. Whilst the artists that I did write about were a pretty fair reflection of what I listen to there’s a long list of people and records that somehow didn’t find their way into the list that I could happily make the case for. The Cardigans’ glorious “Long Gone Before Daylight” album is the most glaring omission in terms of records that I love. Bowie never made it. The Manics never made it either: I could find good reasons for “Motown Junk” or “All Surface, No Feeling” or “Your Love Alone” or the entirety of “The Holy Bible”. No Cowboy Junkies. No Smiths. No PJ Harvey. No Kate Bush. Massive Attack. Portishead. Rilo Kiley. Prince. All sorts of people that I adore that never made it. Posts for another time perhaps.

So, if you read any of the posts and discovered some music because of it then I’m glad. To be honest if you read any of it all then I’m glad. Much as I tried not to get too obsessed with the WordPress stats page I really came to hate those double zero days: no visitors, no views. It was all mostly written for my own benefit but, hey, who am I kidding, having an audience makes it all the more gratifying.

As well as the records it was about me. Whilst you may be thinking that I could have wrapped this up in six words – sad man listens to sad music – I have always been a little verbose and chose to ramble on a bit more than that. There was always a risk that this ended up being an extended version of Springsteen’s “Glory Days” – someone past his best reflecting on former glories. That wasn’t the intent but it does give me an excuse to ensure that Bruce gets yet another mention in the 42 and to watch the none-more-80s video:

If it’s not just a collection of boring stories of glory days then what is it ? There’s another song that bears the name “Glory Days”, tucked away on Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore” album. It’s a song that I probably more readily identified with when I was slightly younger – the nods to single room apartments and wasting days in the café by the station are distinctly 20something references – but the spirit of it still rings true.

If it all amounts to nothing these are still our glory days. There it is again. That acknowledgement that there might not be a greater point to all of this but these moments are still what we have. I have bashed myself around the head repeatedly with this fairly simple conclusion, one day if I bash hard enough it may actually sink in. Not entirely seriously, writing the 42 was, in honour of that number, an attempt to work out what it’s all about. The big one. Life, the Universe, everything (rest in peace Douglas). And I think I did. It’s about moments and love and friendship and community.

For me it’s also about writing. If the slightly up-its-own-arse conceit behind writing these posts was about working out the meaning of life via 42 records of personal significance (slightly up-its-own-arse ? disappeared so far up it has emerged from the top of my own head) then actually the real purpose was to write again. Rather than sit and stare forlornly at a blank piece of paper waiting for my novel to disgorge itself this process gave me a route back to writing.

The key lines for me in “Glory Days” (the Pulp one) are the ones about the promise of potential:

Oh and I could be a genius if I just put my mind to it

And I could do anything if only I could get round to it

I hid behind those lines for a long time with respect to actually trying to write something and I won’t hide behind them anymore. I have started again and I won’t be stopping – otherwise it’s Springsteen’s “Glory Days” that becomes the end note to this project and that isn’t what I want. I’ve read all of the entries in the 42 back to myself. Some of it isn’t great and there’s quite a bit I would change but, you know what, some of it isn’t half bad and I’m proud to have seen it through. I’m sure there will be other posts to come about music and possibly some that are about me but I think I will be actively trying to write more fiction now. I may still end up telling my own story but I may use some other characters and other vehicles to do it.

Hope you enjoyed it and got something from it. So long, for now, and thanks for all the fish.

My 10 rules for writing

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It was the last class of my local writing group on Monday, a long break for the summer until we reconvene in September. I’ll mop up a couple of loose ends later in the week but, for now, here’s my homework from the previous week. The brief was “10 excuses for not doing your homework” which I altered a bit, inspired by the memory of a corporate, motivational, change-your-life style speaker I saw last year at a work event (guy called Jim Lawless who has a book out called “10 rules for Taming Tigers”). That day is a story for another time…

So here, not entirely seriously, are 10 rules for doing your writing homework. The only other things you might need to know are that Sally is the name of the person that keeps our motley crew in good order and leggy blondes are a standing, group in-joke.

  1. Write it. Just write it. Scribbled on a napkin, scrawled in a book, typed neatly on a page – it doesn’t matter. Just put words down on some kind of page in some kind of order. Grammar is optional. Spelling is for spell checkers. Write.
  2. Ignore the instructions. Sally won’t mind. If no inspiration comes based on the instructions then ignore them in deference to rule 1.
  3. Don’t count words. Make words count.
  4. Take inspiration from wherever you can. Sometimes this may involve stealing stuff and making it your own. I must have stolen number 3.
  5. Don’t measure the worth of your work against other people’s. You’re probably not going to write “Hamlet” but then Shakespeare might not have done either. Marlowe always seemed quite plausible to me.
  6. If you get stuck just write something else. Edit later. Research later (or possibly earlier). They’re different things.
  7. A leggy blonde will always help any story. And so will the marvelous people at your local writing group.
  8. No one can really tell you exactly how to do it. Whilst this may seem disheartening it also means no one can really tell you that you’re doing it wrong.
  9. You’ll probably be your own harshest critic. Let someone else read what you write and you might be pleasantly surprised. If you’re not pleasantly surprised then defer to rule 8 and ignore them.
  10. Ten rules seems overly complicated for what is essentially a process of making stuff up and writing it down. So ignore all of this. Except the first one. Write.

I must be losing my mind

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37. Lazarus – The Boo Radleys (with guest appearances from “Indian” – The Cult and “Finest Worksong” – REM)

A cautionary tale from a more guilty time…

Where are they ? Where the fuck are they ? It’s been too long. Something must be wrong, properly wrong. Must be wrong to have been this long. Too long. Too, too long. Wrong. Wrooong. Fuck. Get a grip. Concentrate. Think. Mind enhancing, isn’t that what this is supposed to be ? An upgrade. A stepping up and out of normal consciousness. So thinking shouldn’t be too hard. It should be easier and better in fact. Shouldn’t get stuck on an echoing rhyme of long and wrong bouncing around endlessly in my head. Long. Wrong. Long. How long could this go on ? And not be wrong ? Or be wrong ? How long ?

I seem to have lost something here. It might be my mind. If I sit very, very still perhaps nobody will notice. Not that anyone is here anymore, only me and Andy. He won’t have lost his mind, I think he’s used to the artificial enhancement. I better not let on that mine may have been misplaced, it won’t look good, will make it look like I don’t know what I’m doing. I should let you in on a secret though – I don’t actually know what I’m doing. But if I sit here very, very still and just listen to these songs then nobody need know and in a few hours I expect – at least I’ve been told – that I will find my mind again. The mind I will find. A mind find.

Focus. Don’t start all that again. He will suspect if you start all that again, the rhyming of a madman. Although I don’t think I said it out loud so how would he know ? It feels like he would know. He seems calm, just sitting there listening to the songs, so that’s what I need to be. He seemed pretty calm when we rang the ambulance, the only one thinking we should get out of the house and find a phone box. Best not let them know where we are. Smart thinking. We were just panicking. He seemed calm when the ambulance picked them up. I’m glad he didn’t go with them. He’s the only one who knows what’s going on so I’m glad he stayed. He can’t have been completely calm though because as we were walking back across that petrol station forecourt he didn’t seem to see the fuel lorry siphoning its load into the ground. He can’t have seen it otherwise he wouldn’t have lit that fag as we walked by. We both saw the guy come running out of the booth shouting and waving his hands. We ran.

There could have been an explosion. A spark was all it needed. Like the ones he’s making now, running his thumb around the wheel of that lighter, holding it upside down and watching the flame invert itself. Why does it do that ? I should know this. Heat rises, maybe that’s it. Maybe the flame rises too. Maybe I’ve been looking at that flame for a long time now. It feels like a long time. Best look away before he gets suspicious. Just listen to the songs.

He’s rewinding the tape again. How many times is that ? The same three songs over and over again. “Lazarus” and that one by The Cult and then REM, “Finest Worksong”. Bliss. Despair. Hope. Again and again and again. Did he only tape three songs ‘cos they’re all so long ? So long and not wrong. Steady, hang in there, focus. I know these songs and they’re not that long. Time stretching out and out and out must be one of the enhancements. Only that Cult song – what’s it called, Indian Woman or something – sounds so bleak and I don’t want it to go on and on and on. Standing at the edge of the world. Me too Ian, me too. What happened to you and Billy Duffy after Love anyway ? He suddenly learned the guitar as if he’d had a time machine like at the end of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and you uncovered some long lost Native American heritage and started prancing around with feathers in your hair. Maybe you had some of what we’ve had. Come to think of it you probably had quite a lot. Where do you get the Native American stuff ? Peyote. That’s it. Rhymes with coyote. Shit – where is my mind ?

Standing at the edge of the world… Wonder where they are ? They must have gotten to the hospital by now. Ages ago in fact. We’ve listened to these three songs – the longest, longest songs in the world, the longest songs ever recorded – at least four times so hours must have been and passed. I can’t listen to this one again. I need to tell Andy to turn it off. That refrain, it’s killing me. What if they are standing at the edge of the world ? Not literally. I haven’t lost that much of my mind. Just misplaced some of it. Not literally. What if they lost theirs and they can’t find it again ? He seemed pretty out of it. We’re all pretty out of it. Keeping clear of heavy machinery might be a good idea. What’s Andy doing skinning up again ? Surely that’s not a good idea ? In for a penny I guess.

It started well. That’s what we’ll probably say later when we’re laughing about it. It started well. Like these songs. Wait for Lazarus to come back on ‘cos that’s kind of how it started. A slow vibrating, swelling noise – dislocated shapes echoing out of the silence. Shapes ? Shapes don’t echo. Ignore me, I’m wasted. Settling into that dub bass with the fragments of feedback sounding queasily in the background, everything shifting and sliding slowly out of the old focus and into something different. Shaking your head as if descending into a dream and then that build into the trumpet, rising, rising, swelling and rising, peaking and climbing, a wave crashing over the sea wall you’ve put up around your consciousness. Jesus I am wasted. But that’s how it started. The song ? Not just the song.

I must be losing my mind…. It’s right there in the first verse. It’s not like they’re hiding these clues. It’s not particularly oblique. I must be losing my mind. Lost it and bought the tee shirt. Lost it and we’re a man down, carted off for an adventure in A&E whilst we sit here in silence and listen because we don’t know what else to do and don’t have control of our brains anymore. But it started well.

And now it’s The Cult again and standing at the edge of the world and, presumably, slipping off the edge of the world and tumbling into some terrible abyss, never to return. Except… except hang in there for a few minutes – it will feel like a few hours but believe that it’s a few minutes – and REM will roll around again. “Finest Worksong” is the most aptly titled song in the world. Listen to it blazing out of that cheap little tape player, all defiance and pride and get-up-and-go. I want to roll up my sleeves. Andy wants to roll up a joint. He is rolling one up. No wonder we’re not finding our minds, he must have done this every time that song has come on. Worksong, roll one up. Rewind tape. Smoke joint. Listen to Lazarus and believe we are touching the outer limits of a higher state of being. Finish smoking. Listen to The Cult and believe we are about to be pitched into the deepest reaches of hell itself, taunted by Ian Astbury, possibly brandishing a tomahawk. Worksong. Repeat. Must break the cycle but unable to speak. This way madness lies…

What was that ? What the hell was that ? Shit, it’s the phone. It’s… Andy’s answering. How can he still function ? What ? They’re okay ? They’re sitting behind a curtain in A&E on a bed laughing their heads off whilst we’ve been here in despair with Ian Astbury and REM and The Boo Radleys ? If I had any pieces of my mind left I’d be giving them one now. But they’re alright. And that means we’ll be alright.

The moon and shadow

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Just Write (belated catchup): June 9th

I have been somewhat slack in typing up any and all output from recent writing group classes so back to the meeting from the 9th. We spun together a story based on a three stage trigger – a set of three top-of-mind nouns, an imagined landscape, and a character we’d never really thought about before. So, here’s what came of that:

……

Lana jumped on the the back of the mech-bus as it began to move, her umbrella pulling itself shut automatically behind her. She didn’t much notice as the mirco evaporators briefly flared, harvesting and stray water molecules from the umbrella’s surface. Damn pilots she thought. Since they put through that AI upgrade you might as well forget the timetables. Behaving like those real drivers she’d read about from the past, coming and going as they pleased.

She sat. It was only five minutes to the University but she’d been out in that downpour for a while and the seats had the same tech as her umbrella. Weather was getting worse. More extreme even here. God knows how people coped near the equator now, those that were left anyway.

The windows facing her were all running ads. She realised that she’d forgotten to turn her pers-com to private and her presence had been registered. A sequence of commercials tailored to her began to run, isolated on the window in front of her. A set of texts for her study to be sent direct to her personal logs. A bag that matched her umbrella. So far, so predictable she thought, remembering why she ordinarily held her settings as private. Then the window filled with a desolate, grey expanse of rock. A voice: “ever think of starting again ?”. You’re not selling this, she thought. The shot panned to a solitary footprint in the dust, then up and away from the print to an American flag, firmly planted in the ground. With a start she realised this place to start again wasn’t here. It was the moon. They were trailing the colony program again. But why her ? She knew, or thought she knew, enough about the algorithms in the ads that tailored content and messages to individuals. Why did they think she would want to go there ?

……

In case you’re wondering my three nouns were umbrella, bus and University. I had intended to write about the moon but it somehow turned into a pre colonisation story (or the start of one at least). I enjoyed putting it together in the class and could have quite happily spent much longer in 2100 or thereabouts although I’m not sure there’s much new in the final result. Anyway, homework was a stripped back version of the exercise in the class in that each of us gave the person to our left a single word as the trigger for a story. Mine was “shadow” which resulted in this:

……

“Your father lives in shadow.”

“But he lives ?”

The question echoed around the chamber, bouncing back from unfurnished stone. The tomb was cool and still, the question remaining unanswered by the dead. Varane asked it again of the living.

“He lives ?”

“Aye, he lives boy. If dwelling in the shadow can be called living.”

Varane turned. Only Zamar would dare address him as boy, especially in this place amongst generations of his line. Zamar met the boy’s questioning look, narrowed his eyes as if silently appraising him, before speaking again more softly.

“When a man crosses to the shadow Varane he is lost to us. None has ever been reached, none returned. He may dwell there a day, a week, a year – your father is a strong man – but eventually we will lay him here.”

As Zamar spoke Varane paced the tomb, every couple of strides taking him past another generation, names from the past, names and deeds he’d been learning since he could read. He paused at the far end of the room and brushed dust from a name etched into the largest and oldest stone coffin: Ombrager. He lowered his head and whispered:

“How many ?”

“My liege ?” asked Zamar.

Varane lifted his head but did not turn. “How many Zamar ? How many of them…” he raised his arm gesturing at the row of coffins. “How many of them were lost to shadow ?”

“Varane…” began Zamar advancing towards the boy. “It is not yet time to know. You are still so young my liege.” There was a note of kindness in his voice.

“Not time ?” Now Varane did turn. “Not time ? My father lives in shadow and it is not time ?” He strode towards the older man jabbing a finger accusingly. “It is past time Zamar. For all you call me boy it is well past time. Ten generations lie here. How many Zamar ? How many were lost to it ?”

Zamar didn’t move and the two stood face to face in the middle of the chamber, neither breaking the other’s gaze.

“Ten my liege” he said flatly.

Momentarily Varane’s eyes betrayed his shock; a flicker that spoke of incomprehension and a touch of fear. Just as quickly it was gone and Zamar could discern nothing in his grey eyes beyond implacable resolve.

“All of them. Every Ombrager Varane. Some young, some old but all lost to shadow.”

“And none ever reached ?” asked Varane.

“None” replied Zamar gently. “No man passing to shadow has returned.”

Abruptly both men looked back up the tomb, the door had been shoved open and a slight figure stood silhouetted in its frame, light streaming around it. The figure stepped forwards into the tomb, planted hands on hips and grinned.

“Zamar has you right brother” she said. “No man has lived in shadow and returned. But I have.”

“Aurore ? Is that really you ? How… how can this be ?” Varane stepped tentatively towards his sister.

“It’s me little brother” she said. “I lived in shadow and I have returned.”

……

I may return to this (although that would entail working out actually what the hell the shadow is beyond some vague allegorical ideas) as I quite like it. I would change the names as the first couple were nicked from the French football team as I was watching them play in the World Cup at the same time as writing… the latter ones (Ombrager, Aurore) had more of a point relevant to events when translated. Sacre bleu. 

Send that stuff on down to me

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35. There She Goes, My Beautiful World – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

There are days when nothing comes. Days that stretch into weeks that unwind into months and before you realise it, years have passed. It always starts with a blank page, or a page almost blank save for a half formed jotting of an idea: something that felt alive in your mind but that you manage to kill as soon as you set it down in words. That’s how it has been for me these past twenty odd years, my twenty years of pretending to be a writer.

Before I did my degree I was a different kind of writer, one who actually wrote stuff. You may be thinking that’s an altogether better kind of writer for a writer to be. You’d be right. Write ? Right. I’m not going to pretend that the various false endings for one of Joyce’s Dubliners’ stories that I submitted just-for-the-hell-of-it on top of my English A level homework were necessarily particularly good but the point was that I wrote them. Neither will the self deprecating poems that I used to write holed up in a house in Cornwall, sharing my temporary bedroom with a washing machine, during my O levels (GCSEs for strict historical accuracy) be troubling any anthologies anytime soon but, again, the point was they actually made it on to the page. As did thousands and thousands of words, scribbled away like a West Country Adrian Mole, in various editions of my epic teenage diaries. Epic in the sense of there being a lot of it rather than the Homerian sense. Helen of Troy did not feature. Caroline of the number 20 bus did. You probably wouldn’t go to war for her. To be fair she wouldn’t even go to see “Top Gun” with me.

Then something changed. I started talking about writing a lot but didn’t actually write anything. All through University, three years, sitting around talking about the idea of publishing a novel. Picking up my first few jobs in and around Nottingham and thinking how temporary they would all be because I was going to be a writer. And then twenty years went by and I hadn’t written a word.

Which brings us to “There She Goes, My Beautiful World”, Nick Cave’s helter skelter, chaotic rallying cry for inspiration; a plea for help to a lost muse, his personal puzzling out of the creative process.The temptation in writing about a Nick Cave record is, frankly, to just reproduce his lyrics and let them speak for themselves: he is, for my money, the finest lyricist working today. Working seems to be the right word too: Cave famously sets about his craft as if it were a job, taking himself off to his office every day and grinding out the hours. Therein may lie a clue as to why I went twenty years without writing a word…

Cave captures perfectly the vagaries of artists’ approaches to creativity and the fact that various ailments and disadvantages were no impediment to their work:

John Willmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox

Nabokov wrote on index cards, at a lectern, in his socks

St John Of The Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box

And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote Chinese Rocks

We even get a little creative license wrapped up this section of the song. Johnny Thunders didn’t actually write “Chinese Rocks” (it was mostly Dee Dee Ramone) and it would be slightly surprising if Cave didn’t know this but you trying scanning Dee Dee Ramone instead of Johnny Thunders in that line. The next verse runs with the same idea:

Karl Marx squeezed his carbunlces whilst writing Das Kapital

And Gauguin, he buggered off man, and went all tropical

While Philip Larkin stuck it out in a library in Hull

And Dylan Thomas died drunk in St Vincent’s Hospital

I’m not sure there’s anyone else working in what you might loosely term “rock” music today – or indeed in the past – that takes you from Karl Marx and his carbuncles (true) to Paul Gauguin’s adventures in Tahiti. There isn’t anyone else quite as smart, funny, and razor sharp (in words as well as tailoring) as Cave.

Other sections of the song are concerned with trying to recapture the muse, our narrator lying here with nothing in my ears, just lying here with nothing in my head. His pleading for inspiration becomes ever more desperate, ever more imploring, starting out with – I will kneel at your feet, I will lie at your door – and ending up with – I will be your slave, I will peel you grapes, up on your pedestal.

In truth I don’t really know where it comes from. Of late my subconscious has been playing havoc, merrily provoking anxious physical responses to threats that only it sees, but occasionally it also spits out something positive. I was struck by it again at my writing group last night (which I will write up separately) as an exercise that started with a random set of nouns, an imagined landscape, and a character you’ve never met span out into a set of stories in the room that, twenty minutes earlier, hadn’t existed. The people in the room, I suspect, wouldn’t even have known how to reach for those stories and yet, with a bizarre set of prompts, there they were.

I wonder how Cave really works. He can’t, I imagine, sit in his office for eight hours and solidly produce line after line after line. There must be time gazing in agony at a blank page ? A quick browse round the internet ? Doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy that checks his Facebook page very often. Or ever. Maybe it isn’t like that. Maybe he genuinely produces vast reams of stuff and then judiciously mines it down to the gold.

I still struggle with the process. It’s still hard work committing the words to page and not hating every single one of them. But sometimes, out of the work, comes a sense of extraordinary satisfaction that I just don’t get with anything else. It happened last night in the writing group – not even necessarily because my output was that great but I just got lost in it at a time when I needed to get lost in something – and it happens in fits and starts when I write this blog. Courage and persistence and work: I think if the last seven or eight months have taught me anything they’ve taught me that those are the key. The difference between being a writer who doesn’t write, and consequently who can always hide behind a sense of might have been, and one who does, even if it means producing a whole lot of rubbish for the sake of the odd moment of inspiration.

Cave should have the final words. He is a master of them:

So if you got a trumpet, get up on your feet, brother, and blow it

And if you got a field, that don’t yield, get up now and hoe it

I look at you, you look at me, and deep in our hearts babe we know it

That you weren’t much of a muse but I weren’t much of a poet

Dear diary…

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Just Write 19th May: Diary

It’s impossible for me to write the words “dear diary” without it calling to mind “Heathers” which remains one of my all time favourite movies. So many brilliant lines (the clip above has at least two belters in 90 seconds – “are we going to prom or to hell ?”, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count”) and wickedly funny. However, this post has nothing to do with “Heathers” other than the fact that my writing class this week was concerned with diary entries as a potential route in to creative writing.

Starting with the homework from the previous class… We were tasked with keeping a diary for the week but I didn’t do that, or didn’t do that quite as briefed. Inspired by the session on first lines from a fortnight ago I decided to just do an opening line for each day. This in no way reflected the fact that I had left the whole thing until an hour before the class began. No way. Don’t dare insinuate as such… Here ’tis:

Tue 13

I’ve kept a diary since I was 13 and know days that aren’t worth recording: today is one of them.

Wed 14

My new boss fixed me with another stare and leaned in close: “I was a combat soldier for 10 years so I’ve seen people struggle with similar things”.

Thurs 15

“The bomb disposal team are now investigating the car” intoned the voice over the tannoy as we descended another flight of stairs, walking past a sign that ominously declared: “no refuge beyond this point”.

Fri 16

A lovely surprise as one of the bands I had blogged about shares my post on their Facebook page and my blog stats go berserk. (By berserk I mean I get about 200 views in the week which qualifies as berserk relative to my usual stats.)

Sat 17

It doesn’t matter how long I’ve lived here, riding up The Mall in the back of a black cab, watching Buckingham Palace recede through the rear window, still feels magical: like the opening credits to your own movie, the script as yet unwritten.

Sun 18

Nikki is claiming she will never drink again; I am silently congratulating myself on ducking the cocktails in favour of a humble beer.

Mon 19

Decide to start my homework two hours before it’s due which, if a diary is supposed to be an insight into character, is a pretty telling insight. Spend some time debating with myself whether it’s technically cheating to just write first lines for each day in a cunning attempt to splice together the task with something we were doing in the last session. Spend so much time debating it that a first line becomes as much as is realistic in the remaining hour.

I actually thought this worked out pretty well although it helped that some genuinely interesting things happened to me in the week – notably being evacuated to the sub vault of the Bank of England during a bomb scare. Perhaps I should try a one line diary over a longer period of time.

The class itself was a really enjoyable one with a nice mix of character profiling and some subsequent writing based, in part, on the diary idea. The character profiling involved writing up some basic details that we associated with a couple of random selected photographs: name, age, significant others, enemies, current problem etc. In so doing myself and my partner for the exercise came up with a slightly convoluted story about two Americans – Dr Chuck Brody and Charlie Wright and Chuck’s struggle to be honest about his sexuality. It wasn’t entirely serious and wound up a bit like an episode from “Days Of Our Lives”, the soap that Joey from Friends stars in as Dr Drake Ramoray. Anyway, part one of the exercise was a diary entry from, in this case, Dr Brody, about one of three scenarios we were given – in our case, fortunately, one of them was “having an affair” as we’d already made that part of the story up in developing the characters ! Part two was supposed to be more of a show-don’t-tell piece of prose just after the moment at which the affair had become known to both parties. Make of it what you will:

Trouble again today, I can’t keep this from Charlie for much longer. Met up with Milton as planned, the usual pretext for Charlie – we’re just catching a game of tennis after work. Went to that new place down town, La Scala. Figured she wouldn’t know, besides I think she was trying to sort things out with Grace tonight. But Leyton was there. Man what are the chances ? He saw us. We spoke for chrissakes, I made something up about double booking the court but did he see how close we were ? It’s not so strange, two guys catching a bite to eat and Leyton’s met Milton before so why am I freaking out ? It’ll break her, this on top of the custody battle. What was that joke she keeps making ? You’re number two Chuck, this has gotta work out – I can’t be a divorce lawyer with two divorces on my watch.

……

Leyton called the waiter over to get the cheque and then froze, fingers raised in the air. It was Chuck and Charlie. He was about to turn his raised fingers into a wave to attract their attention but hesitated. Charlie had quickly taken her seat leaving Chuck standing, a puzzled look on his face. She had already picked up a menu, raised in front of her face like a shield. Chuck sat down opposite her and studied the table in silence. Hadn’t he seen Chuck in here last week ? With that guy ? Milton. That was him. They’d been sat together, maybe poring over some documents he guessed, shuffled up close so they could both see. He’d said hello but they’d seemed offhand and Chuck had dashed off. Strange he was back so soon, he must have rated this place. Charlie was still buried in her menu but, briefly, it lowered as she let it slip from her fingers. It was hard to tell across the room but Leyton could’ve sworn she was crying.

As mentioned it all came out far soapier than planned. I think we’d set up a comedy (even with daft name gags – Milton Keynes and Leyton Buzzard) which I then didn’t really commit to in what I ended up writing so it sort of fell somewhere between a not very funny farce and a not very convincing drama. Ho hum. Lessons learned… and I guess that’s the point.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

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Just Write, Monday 5th May: First lines.

I have been a little remiss in posting updates following the last couple of writing class sessions so I’ll try to redress over this post and next to cover the 5th and 19th (we didn’t meet on the 12th). As my first line suggests we spent some time a fortnight ago covering, ahem, first lines. From a relatively straightforward prompt – man and woman meeting for the first time – I had:

She only realised she was still alive as he pulled her dead husband off her.

“I can’t believe it meant that little to you. It’s me, Sophie !”

“Hi, are you Michaela ? Thanks for filling in – I usually throw the knives from here but just relax, I’ll let you know where to stand”

Notably none of them will be troubling this post’s title as killer openings (typing this up I note that I’d scribbled “it is a truth universally acknowledged…” in the margin of my notebook, possibly as inspiration, possibly as an ironic nod to the limits of my efforts). However, I don’t entirely hate the slightly gloomy first one and the last one works alright in a light, knockabout way.

The main exercise expanded from a prescribed first line and, as usual, involved a quick five minutes of free writing. Opener was “why did you do that ?”

“Why did you do that ?”

“I don’t know.” I was pleading now, an urgent catch in my voice. My head was swimming and I tried to slow everything down, tried to make sense of it all.

“Come on !” he barked. He’d been growing ever more impatient, striding around the small holding cell, and now he leaned in close. “You must know Mr Reynolds. You do know.”

Silence hung between us. He didn’t move away and I held his gaze for fear that to look away might hint at guilt, might give him further cause to doubt me. Eventually he strode back across the room, his back to me.

“You withdrew £200 Mr Reynolds, on each of your three cards. Yesterday we have a witness statement that says you bought a new mobile phone but you were still in contract on your old one. You erased the contents of your hard drive.”

“I just don’t know…” I trailed off.

“And today, Mr Reynolds, we pulled your wife out of the Manchester canal. So I ask again: why did you do that ?”

I am tending to find that I’m producing work outside of the class – either as part of the homework or unrelated – that I’m more satisfied with and this wasn’t an exception. I like the discipline of being thrown a start point and having to produce something but it’s rare that it produces anything I’d necessarily keep. In this instance I was reasonably happy with the mood of the scene and the premise was okay (man genuinely not aware of what he may or may not have done despite large body of evidence against him) if not especially original. I suspect, however, that a terse, tight thriller is not going to be my calling…

I would like to write about…

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Anything that doesn’t contain the word “customer” or “segmentation” or “retail” or any of those myriad of corporate non-words that I regurgitate every day. That language that is never taught but which everyone in an office learns to speak. Going forwards. On the same page. Outside the box. Out of our comfort zone. All utter nonsense.

Going forwards, to really get out of my comfort zone, to fully step change my thinking out of the box, I’d like to actually write about:

  • A story of grief and escape, Emily’s story as she comes to terms with the loss of her father and finds expression through their shared love of country music. A wise, sad, funny coming of age story I’d like them to say. I’d settle for less.
  • A knockabout comedy loosely based on The Wizard of Oz; a girl named Dorothy moves to London from Australia, landing in an upstairs flat as the woman in the flat beneath dies. She would meet, and date, three men lacking in brain and heart and courage before setting her faith in someone else; he, of course, would prove to be a fraud. There probably wouldn’t be winged monkeys.
  • Six stories, interlocking, set in and around Marylebone station. The conceit being that each story would start as a train arrived at each of Marylebone’s six platforms. The centre piece involves a chance meeting of a man and woman who, through a plot device yet to be established, end up killing a substantial amount of time together exploring the streets in that part of town. I guess it would be about falling in love, an exploration of those first moments as strangers realise a deep set connection. There’s a risk that this doesn’t so much tread as trample on Richard Linklater’s toes – if you haven’t seen “Before Sunrise” then don’t watch it, you will never need know my inspiration.
  • Me. Perhaps in a way that comes off as slightly less narcissistic than just “me”. I would like to tell my story, how I made some bad choices and ended up with a career I didn’t really want. How my body parts ganged up on me over a period of a few years and decided to fail, one by one. How my mind, previously relied upon as a trusted ally, joined the rebellion. How my so called career careered out of control (puns are non negotiable) and I spent a glorious six months out, re-evaluating, reconnecting, not thinking too much. How, during that time, I saw llamas in Amersham and, in that oddly incongrous moment, saw my life as mildly absurd but potentially wonderful. How the appearance of something out of the ordinary could help me see that everything might be seen fresh as out of the ordinary: family, friends, the school run, cleaning the bathroom even. I would write that as the happy ending, as the lesson learned, and then I would write the epilogue; that life’s not as neat as that, that sometimes when you return to where you saw the llamas it’s now just sheep and no matter how much you tell yourself that just sheep can be out of the ordinary too, it’s hard. It’s ordinary. It’s just sheep. Undoubtedly I would write using other metaphors and other analogies. Hopefully some of them would be better than that one….

……

My writing classes began again last week and, as promised, I’ve scrapped the old labelling of those posts in the title – I’ve even given these posts their very own category. The piece above was actually the homework for next week – write for 5 minutes or so from “I would like to write about…” as a trigger.

The bulk of the class was spent on an exercise in “show, don’t tell” (none of which I appear to have used above) which was surprisingly hard; finding means to reveal character or what someone is feeling through their actions. None of it was remotely in a shape to be shared here… so I won’t.

At some point I should possibly assert some kind of copyright on this blog in the unlikely event that I write something a) good b) that is read, and c) gets stolen. Whilst I investigate how I do that then take this sentence as an assertion that the work herein (herein sounds suitably legal) is mine and please don’t duplicate it or share it without appropriate acknowledgement of the source (i.e. me).