The Life Pursuit

I thought I hadn't had much e-mail for a few days because nobody loves me, but I started fiddling with it this morning and something has gone seriously asquew - the first thing that downloaded was an e-mail from a friend sent on the 22nd July 2004...

However, as far as I know I don't owe anybody e-mail, so if you have written to me and not heard back, I didn't hear from you in the first place. And I have (apparently) fixed the problem, so if you would kindly resend any e-mail... that is if anyone actually sent me anything in the last little while, when probably they didn't because nobody loves me... Oh come on, at least someone must want to offer me some Viagra or something?

I was supposed to have a visitor this afternoon - first one in six months - but since my e-mail has buggered itself up I don't know if he's coming. I think I will have to resort to the use of... the telephone! Aaaagh!

Oh now post has arrived and there's lots of that. So someone loves me. Oxfam loves me, Tesco loves me, La Redoute loves me (all this strikes me as rather conditional love)... oh and Marmite Boy! Oh I'll be all right now as I have a nice CD to listen to. Gracias mucho muchacho del Marmite.

Lessons I have learnt about writing novels: Writer's Block

With anything you work at over a sustained length of time, there are going to be times when it is more difficult to do for all kinds of subtle reasons. Writing is no different. Writer’s Block is no different from any other funk people come to in work which requires concentration, creativity and self-motivation and I believe the mythology around it to be dangerous on two counts.

The first is that there is a point where you become incapacitated for work by emotional events, physical or mental health and this may kick in long before you lose the ability to hold a pen or type. Regarding your inability to write as some sort of metaphysical breakdown or a personal betrayal on the part of your muse, is likely to add to your suffering. If you are not well enough to write or life has taken over, you can but wait out the crisis.

The second problem with the concept of Writer’s Block is that, failing such an all-consuming crisis, creativity can be and must be stimulated. Any artist who expects inspiration to dance in through the window on a sunbeam to enable the masterpiece to be produced is never going to achieve anything. Any artist who is solely interested in the masterpiece is not really an artist at all.

Those people who have produced masterpieces along with others who have produced great inventions or revolutionary theories have almost always produced a great deal of other, not quite so fantastic work. That quote about the ratio between persperation and inspiration is very apt. The great thing about writing is that writers can claim to suffer for our art, whereas folks who have proper jobs have to make do with having an off-day.

In fact, it is not quite as simple as that, because writing does take more discipline that most nine-to-five jobs. You set your own hours and only have yourself to answer to if you don’t stick to them. At least before you become successful, you are either juggling writing with a proper job or else writing whilst unemployed. Most reasons a person is long-term unemployed besides hideous personal wealth present their own challenges; the stress of poverty, the pressing need to get a proper job and/ or the many and varied effects of ill health and disability.

Apart from this, you have a great deal of unanswerable questions about the work you are doing; is it any good? Will it get finished? When will it be finished? Will it be any good when it is finished? Will anyone want to read it? Will I get published? Will I get enough money to live on? All of the above call into question whether the entire exercise is worthwhile. To put such questions aside for the amount of time it takes to write a book requires bloody-mindedness tantamount to madness.

So well, it isn’t quite the same as a normal work…

I was going to include my Goldfish Guide To Self-Discipline here but that'll have to be another day.

Mini Meme

Gimpy Mumpy has tagged me with a meme! Okay…


Two jobs in my life:

Advertising Executive - I had to inflate and hand out helium balloons advertising Tesco’s latest range of breakfast cereal.

Vatican Official – I used to serve drinks and wash up for events put on for the local Catholic Women’s Guild. For money, obviously.


Two films that I could watch over and over:

Harold & Maude

Hedwig and The Angry Inch


Two places I have lived:

Ipswich – The birthplace of Justin R.

Whitby – The birthplace of English Literature.


Two TV series I like:

Blackadder

The Simpsons


Two places I’ve been on vacation:

Dublin, which rocked.

The Hatfield campus of the University of Hertfordshire – I bet no-one else has holidayed there (except for Vic who was there too).


Two foods I love:

Green & Black's Maya Gold Chocolate

Lasagne - meat or vegetable.


Two websites I visit daily:

The BBC

eBay (well almost daily, but I sell more than I buy - honest!)


Two places I’d rather be right now:

Hmm… now there’s a revelation; just now there’s nowhere in the world I would rather be! If I had to be somewhere else... Oh I don't know, I really don't, sorry. Imagination failure.


Two bloggers who should play:

Uh... Marmite Boy and Pete

Although I should inform Lady Bracknell that she has been tagged on this elsewhere if she wasn't already aware.

I believe in miracles

I sit and work on the sofa with my laptop. Behind me on the wall hang our three guitars, the bass, the BC Rich Warlock (which looks precisely like this on your left) and my darling acoustic guitar. Now currently I am very nervous about my computer because the CD drive is playing up and I haven’t been able to back up my work for the last couple of months.

I had been playing with aforementioned darling about ten minutes before this occurred. I then put the guitar back, put my headphones on and carry on working. Sometime during Let It Be there is a big thud behind me.

Darling acoustic has fallen; the bracket has taken a big chunk of plaster out of the wall, but miraculously it is sat on the top of the bookshelf, resting comfortably against the still suspended Warlock.

Any other angle would have resulted in at least the destruction of this treasured guitar which is older than I am, if not the guitar smashing into my laptop thus losing all the work I have done in the last few months, e-mails etc and causing hundreds of pounds of damage and knocking me very hard on the head on its way down. Naturally in my current traumatised state I imagine that I would be instantly killed by the weight of a full size guitar falling on my head (what a rock'n'roll way to go!), but when I calm down I’ll probably get a little perspective on this.

Someone is looking out for me.

[...] came in and said, "Bugger, I'll have to patch that wall up now."

Poetry Corner: St. Valentine's Day Massacre

This makes two bad poems within the space of a few weeks – sorry! This poem was inspired by trawling though the contents of my Shopping inbox as accumulated in the last few weeks. I was thinking massacre as in a massacre of the English language. Is it my imagination or is this Valentine's Day lark even worse this year? Do people actually buy into this stuff?

The least depressing Valentine's themed mailing, on account of having all number of items it would have never have occurred to me to give for Valentne’s Day, was the fetish shop mailing. Ur, now I must explain… I got on the mailing list by buying an entirely innocent pair of stockings. Long-legged ladies will know that it is impossible to get ladies’ stockings which are quite long enough, so one must wear stockings designed for men. Marks & Spencer don’t stock seamed stockings designed for men. In fact, M&S don’t even stock stockings with seams!

By Jingo, my grandfathers did not fight a World War with smudged eye-liner down their legs so that future generations could wear seamless polyester tights with a cotton gusset. Unfortunately the only place that a chap can get a decent pair of seamed stockings is in a fetish shop and that’s how I got on their list. Okay? Glad to have cleared that one up.

It occurs to me that if you are skint, you could learn this poem (give it a different title like My Lovely Darling Squelchy Princess) and recite it to the object of your affection. I did attempt this myself, but was interrupted during the second line with “Are you going to tell me what you want for lunch today or what?"


St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

Why tie a ribbon round my love,
Or cup my love in silk and lace?
Why smother it in chocolate
Which spoils me for my love’s own taste?

Why wrap pink paper round my love
Red hearts my love to represent?
Why bottle it with rich perfumes
Which mask love’s own distinctive scent?

Why bind my love in chains of gold,
Weighed down with jewels of wondrous size?
Why gild my love so to conceal
Love's naked beauty from my eyes?

Why muddle love with clumsy words,
Or flowers that quickly wilt and fade?
Why fill the room with violins,
And drown out love’s own serenade?

No fluffy handcuffs for my love
No bubbles, corked and left on ice.
Why tangle love in satin sheets?
My love’s own texture will suffice.

Why do I write these awful poems
In the middle of the night?
For in the morning I awake,
And read them – and I get a fright!

Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?

This week my normally liberal stance on things has been rather tested. First by the furore over some cartoons published in the Danish Newspaper, Jyllands-Posten and then by the trial of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett (nice French name that – so much for the indigenous people of the British Isles).

Of course I wouldn’t have banned those cartoons, but they were horrible. Well, not all of them, but a few were pretty nasty and the fact they appeared in series, as The Mohammed Series makes it clear to me that their sole intention was to shock people in general and insult Muslims in particular. The fact the cartoons depicted the Prophet Mohammed is of dubious relevance – nobody deserves their religion mocked in such a vicious manner.

At the same time, I have the strong suspicion that most of the people burning flags and issuing death-threats didn’t even see the thing, but what do we learn from this?

You have a big group of people who already feel persecuted. In some countries, they have been subject to violence en masse for reasons which could appear to be related to their faith. In other countries, they are subject to suspicion, increased police interest and various forms of abuse because of the supposed association between Al Queda and the Muslim faith.

So what’s about the worst thing a media organisation can do; criticise the culture and governments of Muslim countries? Criticise Muslim community leaders? Criticise faith schools and other forms of segregation? Discuss social problems faced by Muslim communities? No; all this stuff happens all the time. What is about the worst thing you can do to a person who feels isolated and hated, verging on paranoia?

Well, you take the piss out of them. Like that.

So whilst I’m disturbed by the ferocity of the reaction to a set of cartoons – which are at the end of the day, well, a set of cartoons - this was a big mistake.

As for Nick Griffin et. al., my logical mind says that he and the BNP should be allowed to say whatever they like, so long as nobody is subjected to it and so long as they don’t incite a criminal offence. But their words disturb me very much. That people can grow up in my country and say such things makes me ashamed to be British. However, that people can talk such utter cock and not fear violence or summary imprisonment is, perhaps, something we can be proud of.

Lessons I have learnt about writing novels - Characters #1

When I first started, I thought the most important thing about characters was that the reader never caught sight of the strings. Late I learnt that it is possible to create characters who don’t need strings. Unfortunately, this involves nothing so simply as a Blue Fairy.

Most of us understand the concept of writer as God and the idea that God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. Both writers and theologians are likely to struggle with the concept of omnipotence, since if someone else is all-powerful, how can human beings have free will and be truly responsible for their actions? But hey, that’s not our problem.

Omnipresence is the thing. You cannot merely see everything that goes on from the outside; you have to see inside every character who is of any significance to the plot. Not just inside their heads, but looking out at the world from behind their eyes.

This may sound obvious, but it wasn’t to me. Initially I thought that as long as I knew my protagonist inside out, and had a reasonable understanding of what made the other characters tick, I would be okay. After all, if I was writing a true account of some adventure or other, I would only have to record what others said and did.

But I wasn’t writing about events that had actually happened. It became very easy to make continuity mistakes because I was only following one thread out of the several I was writing about – of course other threads will disappear out of view to a reader, but the writer must keep sight of all those threads all the way along. I also found I was struggling with the words of other characters.

It doesn’t help that our culture’s primary medium of story-telling is now films and television. Some films and television dramas are truly excellent, but a hell of a lot of them take short cuts. For example, there are literally dozens of films about an American policeman who is barely holding onto his job due to his maverick behaviour, facing an enemy whose megalomania can only be explained by the fact that he does a really bad European accent. Some of these films are entirely watchable, a few even entertaining, but we only have to buy into it for ninety minutes, we already know the rules and there are so many explosions, car-chases and fight sequences that we don’t have time to think twice about it.

It is possible to write books like this I suppose, but it seems very dishonest. It plays upon a psychological defence mechanism that has us think the world is made up of good people and bad people. The good people can be flawed, even complicated, but bad people do bad things for no particular reason. We read stories about bad behaviour in the news and think monsters; they are not like us or anybody we know. People even speak this way about those who commit adultery, fiddle taxes, park in disabled spaces, speed or even smoke.

A lot of post-modern literature tries to resolve this false dichotomy by making everyone bad – not necessarily criminal, but selfish and cheating. But cynicism is just as unrealistic, and far less enjoyable to read than the worst excesses of romanticism – you grow to hate all the characters, so lose interest in their experiences.

Another solution often attempted particularly in crime fiction is to give less savoury characters mental illness. This person does a bad thing because they’re nuts and that explains whatever they get up to – whether they are a compulsive liar or a serial killer. This may seem to give a lazy writer complete licence over whatever weird or wacky behaviour their character indulges in, but it’s all bollocks. People, regardless of mental health, sometimes behave irrationally, but there is always also some (warped) rationale behind it. Even the most naive reader is going to struggle with an evil genius who travels the world performing a range of massively complex but gruesome murders on clowns, only to have it crop up that as a tiny child he was violently sick after eating a Happy Meal.

If you need characters to behave in extreme ways, think of a really good reason for them to do it – consider what circumstances might lead you to do such a thing. Most of us are capable of unkindness; most of us make decisions about whether we are nasty or nice on a regular basis, whether we act with compassion or exploit weakness. Most of us have promiscuous thoughts and even wish that some people would experience the misfortune we feel they deserve. I think most people can envisage dramatic scenarios where there would be at least some temptation for us to do something really very bad.

Your own inner demons are of far more use than anything from our cultural fairytales, because they already exist in a real person. Similarly your capacity to do good and be strong, although this seems far more easy to write about. Probably because it is far more flattering.