How to See

I came across this line in an Arthur Miller short story today. A boy is looking out of a train window on a hot afternoon :

He passed above a block where men were standing in driveways watering their cars as though they were hot elephants.

Isn't that just fantastic? Simple, vivid. Ooh, I wish I'd written that. How many times have I seen people - yes, usually men - washing their cars and thought nothing of it. But Miller saw this. Even in the most mundane of settings there is gold. It just needs someone to see it and to write it down ...

The Weekly Wordcountalizer

I've added a new sidebar widget to my blog today : the Weekly Wordcountalizer. My plan is to set a weekly target of 2,500 words, and then to track my writing progress towards this each day. It's a pretty public commitment, but I think it will be beneficial to get used to meeting a regular "deadline" like this.

Now, I'm wary of such simple targets. I'm no fan of "target culture" and I'm well aware that quantity does not necessarily imply quality. I mean, after all, I could just write the same word 2,500 times and be done with it. But still I think it might be useful to have a clear target in mind each week. 2,500 words is enough for a smallish novel chapter or a short story. If I can produce that much each week I'll be happy. Mind you, if I happen to be working on poetry it's going to be tough! 2,500 words is pretty much a complete volume.

The rule of thumb that is generally used as a target is 1000 words each day. But I've decided to aim for less than this for now. Partly this is because I mean 2,500 new words each week. New shapes hewn from the rock. I do, of course, spend quite a lot of time editing and redrafting, and I'm not going to count any of that towards the total (unless I decide to create a completely new section, say.) And then of course there's all the stuff that needs to be done but that isn't actual writing : like researching markets for submissions and, um, writing this blog.

So, 2,500 words a week it is. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure there will be weeks when there are just too many distractions to meet the target, but hopefully there will be others when I do more ...


Update (10/01/2010) : I've decided to change this around a little. I still want to write a minimum of 500 words per day, but only on "writing days". I found trying to hit 500 words every day when I really needed to be doing some editing/redrafting was a little distracting. So a strict weekly target no longer makes sense and I've removed the Wordcountalizer. I'll just have my resolution to do at least 500 words per writing day to stick to ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (3/100)

... light-years ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

The Blogoffee Coffee Morning

The fantastic Help I Need a Publisher! blog is holding a virtual coffee morning for Macmillan Cancer Support tomorrow (Friday the 25th). Actually I'm hoping it goes on into the afternoon  : I'm a software developer in the mornings and only reveal my secret writer identity after midday. But anyway, if you've come as part of that, hi! Do go over there and join in. There are various things going on, plus you can also contribute to this vital cause.

Feel free to enjoy some coffee and cake while you're here ...

Book Review : Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

My copy of Lud-in-the-Mist has a Neil Gaiman blurb on the back that says this book is :

'The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book'

Now there's a certain amount of hyperbole there, but he's really not far wrong. This book is a gem. It's a fantasy novel originally published in 1926, eleven years before Bilbo Baggins hurried out of his round, green door. It's also a long way in scope and theme from the epic fantasy of Tolkien and his followers. There are no armies or Dark Lords in sight. The book's concerns are smaller, but dramatic enough in their own way. It concerns itself with the staid and proper city of Lud-in-the-Mist, whose citizens are horrified to find that "fairy fruit" is being smuggled into their town, down the river Dapple from the Land of Faerie. The citizens never mention Faerie or its - literally - forbidden fruit, trying to convince themselves that such unsettling things don't exist.

The fruit is dangerous, subversive even : it makes people waste away their lives in all manner of unproductive ways : writing, playing music and, you can be sure, much else besides. The modern reader might see the fruit as an analogue for drugs, but equally it represents the role of beauty and art in our over-controlled, rational lives.That said, Mirrlees is rather ambivalent about the merits of Faerie. We are never actually taken there; it remains an unknown in the text. Faerie as the id to Lud-in-the-Mist's ego perhaps? This is a story of ideas as much as anything. This isn't just another "fantasy" story, and that's wonderfully refreshing.

The book is elegantly, charmingly written. It's as if Virginia Woolf sat down to write The Hobbit and not John Ronald Reuld. Or as if Tolkien had had a crack at a Barchester novel. Or something. I do wonder whether it would struggle to get a publisher these days, though. It starts slowly and proceeds at a gentle pace much of the time.

Still, fans of fantasy and, you know, good writing should seek it out. Recommended.

Lud-In-The-Mist

Flash Fiction : Light Years (2/100)

... thousand ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

OK, You Can Stop Editing Now ...

Once, when I was a boy, I drew a picture of a castle. I had little artistic ability - still don't - but for once it came out well : beautifully proportioned, finely detailed, the sweep of the walls pleasing to the eye. My teacher loved it and wanted to put it into some inter-school exhibition. Encouraged, I kept working at the picture, adding more shading, extra colour, further detail. Some of the new additions didn't work so well so I tried to rub them out, smudging my elegant lines. So I overdrew them, using thicker strokes and denser colour to mask the corrections. Then I tried again. And again. Bit by bit my fine picture dissolved away into grey-brown mud.

I mention this not because it still rankles that I didn't win the inter-school competition - oh no - but to make the point that there comes a point in any artistic work where you should just stop. You're not going to make it any better and you might ruin it instead. Works of art, they say, are never finished; they're merely left. It's certainly true with writing.

Advice books and blogs will always tell you that writing is really about rewriting. You have to polish, polish, polish. Then polish some more! If you don't you're a hopeless amateur! Cut your text by 10%! You know the sort of thing. And, yes, yes, this is often true, of course. You do have to strive for beautiful language, for elegant simplicity, for words that live and breathe. And of course - here's the spelling fascist in me speaking - grammatical errors and spelling mistakes are utterly unacceptable (although, as an aside, you do still see them in published books, even quite well-known ones.) But if you keep cutting by 10% you'll eventually end up with just a single word ...

I for one revise and polish obsessively, both as I write and also afterwards, again and again. It's incredible how, on rereading a "finished" piece after a week or so, I spot gaping flaws in it. So yes, of course, polish, polish, polish. But there comes a point when this becomes counter-productive. You want to smooth out the rough edges, for sure, but if you get rid of all the edges you just end up with homogenized mush. When a band records a song, the early takes are often the best, bum-notes and all. The over-produced, highly-polished thirty-second take can be, ironically, dull. You want life, you want warts-and-all. You want Bob Dylan, you want The White Stripes. You don't want, please, Celine Dion.

I think that for writers with a tendency to obsessiveness - I include myself in that - editing can sometimes be displacement behaviour. Also, revising is easy compared to the effort of original creation and convincing yourself you need to go through your last opus one more time might really be a way of putting off starting the next. Life is short and you have other stories to write. Make each one the best you can at the time, then set it aside. If you find yourself putting back a word that you've already removed and added two or three times before, it's time to move on. Chances are, any difference you make is going to be marginal. If you're having trouble getting published - that would be nearly all of us then - the temptation is to think that one more tweak will make the vital difference. It may, but the chances are it won't. Either you've just not struck lucky yet, or the piece isn't going to work.

If you find yourself constantly drawn to revising a piece, it may be because you really know there are fundamental problems with it you're avoiding having to face. It's easy just to get caught up in the familiar flow of something, tweaking phrasings here and there, convincing yourself you are improving it, when really you're just papering over the cracks. That's where someone else's opinion can be invaluable, of course. But then, if you're not careful, you pay too much attention to what others say. One person thinks the language is too flowery so you excise all the adjectives. Someone else thinks your world isn't vivid enough so you slip them all back in. It can go on for ever.

The trick, it seems to me, is learning to be an editor as well as a writer. Learn to read your own stuff dispassionately. Setting it aside for a time is essential. You need to be able to spot when changes genuinely need to be made, and when the piece is as good as it's going to be. Listen to other people but only take note if the same comments keep coming up. Stay true to your original vision, your own voice.

Be careful of polishing too soon. This is advice I constantly fail to take myself. If your first draft is so carefully edited that you don't want to change it for fear of marring its intricate beauty, then you're not going to want to make any big changes you need to make. Chisel out the approximate shape of your sculpture first, then smooth and shine it.

This refreshing post on the How Publishing Really Works blog touches on a similar area. Perfection doesn't exist. There are many, many succesful books out there with flaws. Possibly every one of them : I haven't read them all yet. Have you ever read Dracula, for example? Don't kill yourself striving for some unattainable ideal. Strive merely to make what you write as bloody fantastic as you can make it. Polish, polish, polish ... and then stop.

By the way, if you do need to go back to an earlier version of a manuscript then that shouldn't be a problem. Writing isn't really like drawing (on paper) at all because you can just take identical copies of your work at any point. You can keep each draft version. If you have a proper back-up scheme in place then you're covered. You do have a proper back-up scheme in place, don't you?

Constructive Summer

... to borrow a title from my current favourite song (by top US-neo-punks-that-sound-quite-like-Hüsker Dü, The Hold Steady). While I'm about it, here's a snatch of the lyrics too :

We’re gonna build something, this summer
We’re gonna build something, this summer
We’ll put it back together- raise up a giant ladder
With love, and trust, and friends, and hammers
We’re gonna lean this ladder up against the water tower
Climb up to the top, and drink and talk ...
Let this be my annual reminder
That we can all be something bigger.

It's an inspiring song, full of the possibilities of life. With a ramalamadingdong sing-along tune. Plus it also gets extra marks for rhyming "summer" with "Saint Joe Strummer".

I mention all this not because I'm turning into a music critic, but, basically, out of grim irony. Because, so far as the writing goes, it's been an almost completely unconstructive summer. The sacred hour or two I normally get in the afternoons for writing has evaporated completely because of the long school holidays. Of course, it's lovely to be able to see more of the daughters and do stuff with them. And, yeah, yeah, I can't complain. Plenty of writers have written books while, I don't know, fighting a war or locked away in prison. Still it's a source of immense frustration. It's a miracle how the bloody hell anyone with any sort of full, normal life - job, family, house - manages to find the space, time and peace to write.

Over the summer I've been reduced to guerrilla-writing : grabbing a notebook whenever I have a spare three minutes and scribbling down whatever idea is fuzzing up my head at the time. Sitting down at my desk to write just hasn't happened. I can't even get to the keyboard without tunneling through archaeological layers of the children's stuff covering it. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Still. Hey ho. Rant over. Deep breaths. The holidays are over now and while it's sad to see summer fading into autumn, the swallows gathering on the wires to fly off south, it's wonderful, wonderful to have a little time to write again. I'm happy to report that work is now progressing on Engn again. And on a variety of other ideas as well.

A while back I agonized over whether I could call myself a writer yet. Now I think you can only really call yourself that when you have managed to establish a quiet, secluded, private place somewhere - a shed, an attic, whatever - to write. A place that is only yours, where there are no distractions. A place where you go, alone, to be a writer. Now that would truly be bliss.

One day, one day ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (1/100)

One ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

Distance Learning MAs in Creative Writing

As I blogged just recently, I've been looking around at distance-learning Masters degrees in Creative Writing, basically whilst waiting for the Open University to reveal theirs. Previously I said the only other such course I knew about was the DLMA at Lancaster University. But a bit more research reveals there are others :

• The Creative Writing MA On-Line at Manchester Metropolitan University
  
• The Professional Writing MA at University College Falmouth
• The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University - but this appears to be closed to new students

If I've missed any, do please comment to say so! I'm restricting myself to the UK here. There must be lots available elsewhere.

Meanwhile, if I hear any updates about the Open University course, I'll post them here ...

Genre Prejudice

A great piece in the Guardian today : a review of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood by Ursula Le Guin. Now I'm biased because, in my view, Le Guin is pretty well divine, but it's fantastic to hear her criticising Atwood for her insistence that this book (and others, such as The Handmaid's Tale) is not Science Fiction. Which it obviously is. But as Le Guin puts it, Science Fiction is "a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders" and Atwood, consequently, "doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto". Ah, Ms. Le Guin, what would we do without you?

Railing against genre-prejudice is a bit of a theme to this blog. At the same time I think it's even a shame we talk about genres that much. All too often it's arbitrary and nonsensical. The Picture of Dorian Gray is "a classic" whereas something like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea volumes are, instead, pigeon-holed as SF and fantasy. How old does a "speculative" book have to be before it is moved across to the "Classics" shelves? And who bloody well takes it upon themselves to decide?


Le Guin loved Atwood's book by the way. I may track it down. But, Le Guin has recently had a new book of her own out - Lavinia - and I must admit I'm rather more inclined to read that one ...