The subs reply to Giles Coren

Let’s see this whole Giles Coren thing through to the end, shall we? Handolio of Hackbash (what an utterly excellent moniker! “Lord Handolio of Hackbash is said to be very disgruntled at poor state of affairs we find ourselves in” Hee hee!) shared a link to the sub-editors’ response to Coren’s swearfest.

Very sharp, very witty, right on the ball. I suspect they were just batting him around like a pair of cats playing with a broken-winged sparrow. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mia and Joanna when they really had their claws out.

A scene from a drama (red planet prize)

1. INT. LAURENCE’S PLACE – DAY 1 17:00

LAURENCE is writing a blog post. He’s on his own. He leans over the keyboard, intermittently reading back his words to himself, shaking his head, gazing out of the window at the summer rain and sipping coffee from a dirty mug.

LAURENCE

I’ve never seriously considered writing a script of any kind. Don’t know why, really. Never really thought about it. The only objective I ever had was to write a novel.

(beat; LAURENCE drains his coffee)

Now I’ve been writing – I mean really writing – for a year and a half now, and it’s kind of opened the floodgates. I want to have a stab at all kinds of fiction. Novels, short stories, scripts for telly, maybe even a film script. Uh, everything except poetry. Did that when I was seventeen. Never again.

(LAURENCE picks up coffee cup, looks in it, is disappointed to find it empty)

I read about this Red Planet prize. These geezers that do telly programmes are giving away cash for a decent script. Not only that, they’ll maybe get it into production. Talk about a bloody shortcut. I thought, wouldn’t it be so bloody fantastic if I could just crack out a script, bung it over and hey-ho, off we go.

‘Cept it ain’t so easy as that, as I found out. I sat down, got an idea for a script, started writing it, and discovered that I’d ended up with Hustle meets Spooks. Interesting, but not exactly original. Then I pulled my favourite characters out of that and put them in a sitcom set in a mental hospital. Turned out they weren’t any good at being funny. Nor was the mental hospital, come to think of it.

(beat; LAURENCE sighs)

So yesterday I thought, forget it, concentrate on the novel. Come back to scripts and stuff like that another time. Then I read another blog post from these Red Planet guys – nothing special, just one of them FAQs – and I’m all inspired to write a script again. Maybe a sitcom about a struggling writer? Heh. Don’t think so. That’s been done. Hasn’t it?

END

You can find out more about the Red Planet Prize here.

Hiatus (plural) and how to stop hiating.

I hiate hiatus. Sorry, I hate hiatus. By hiatus I mean not writing anything for four days or more. A break of one day is a pause for thought. That’s fine; it means you’re thinking about stuff. Two days? Well, that could be a busy weekend, catching up on jobs, entertaining the kids. Being a family guy or girl. Three days…well, now it’s a worry. What was it you were writing three days ago? What was happening? Why did you stop? Were you trying to improve some dialogue or maybe re-route a scene? Hmm. Get back to it tomorrow.

Then four days have passed, and you haven’t written anything. You open the word processor or thumb through the moleskine. You look at your last written words and try to put yourself back into that state of mind, that place you inhabit when your writing just flows. You can’t. You get frustrated and angry with yourself for leaving it so long.

When he’s working on a novel, Stephen King writes in excess of 2000 words a day. He won’t rest until he’s met that target, even if it’s 4am and it’s humid enough to make the underside of your forearms stick to the table and your glasses slide down your nose. King keeps his writers’ muscle well exercised, just like a professional athlete following his training regime day in day out. I bet he never has to go back to that evil place where he’s trying to make up for four day’s slacking off. Hey, his evil places are right there on the page.

I hope you’re not reading this in search of a solution to the four day problem. I have a few tricks that help to get me back in the driving seat, that’s all. I think about the story, turning it around in my head. I chew it like a bone. I watch people, pretending that they are characters from my story right there in front of me. What are they doing? What are they saying? How are they behaving? If I could control them, what would I have them do next? I watch television drama and criticise the scriptwriting and the poor characterisation. Then I turn that criticism on myself and the blank space that follows on from the last words I wrote.

Saturday night, the night before last, I finally found a way through a scene that I’m stuck on in The Novel. It’s a critical scene, because the behaviour of one of the key characters changes quite dramatically. I know why it changes and how it changes. What I didn’t know is how to show that without simply telling the reader in dull narrative description. The inspiration came during a live performance by The Black Keys on Channel 4’s Live from Abbey Road. I watched Dan Auerbach playing guitar, holding the plank near to the Marshall speakers to get some feedback. It was the way he did it, with such precision and control in the midst of unbridled noise chaos. It fitted my character perfectly, since I could visualise him doing the same thing. It was a perfect way to end the scene.

Ultimately, I should commit myself to writing every day. Writing something. Doesn’t matter what. Keep writing. Keep exercising. And finish the goddam Novel.

Giles Coren is miffed

This blog is about me, right? So I don’t link to other stuff. In this case, though, I’ll make an exception. Well known food critic Giles Coren got seriously seriously steamed up with a sub editor or sub editors unknown at The Times. Why? Because they removed one letter from his piece.

One letter, eh? So what? But read his letter (here) and you’ll see how utterly important it was to the piece. Well, as far as he was concerned anyway. Note, the letter is more than a little sweary. Sit well back from the monitor if you don’t want to get flecks of furious spittle in your eyes.

As an amusing adjunct someone (likely not Giles himself) set up a twitter account @GilesCoren and has spent the last 3 hours (at the time of writing) being utterly, profanely furious with a rather bemused set of British journos and bloggers.

Yeah, I got a follow from @GilesCoren and I returned it. It was like opening a Pandora’s box of expletives. Ace!

Hacking The Novel about…soon

Following the long hard stare I took at The Novel I’ve decided not to start waving my metaphorical scythe about just yet. This is editing, after all, so a methodical approach is appropriate. I’ve made a kind of chapter list, a series of keyword descriptions about what happens when. A storyboard without pictures.

On this list I have flagged each item in one of four ways:

• keep it, it’s fine
• drop it, it doesn’t add anything to the story
• needs to be written
• does not need to be written

Now I’m sitting on my conclusions for a day or two to see if I’m going the right way. The stark fist of removal is no doubt required. I’m just not sure how stark it needs to be.

I shall also employ that other editoral trick of putting The Novel aside for a while and re-reading it with a clear mind sometime later. Which is fine, because I have three other writing tasks clamouring for my attention.

A long hard stare

Tonight I pulled out the Word document that represents the only tangible evidence of The Novel and gave it a long hard stare. Then I put it away and dissembled for a while, bathing, drying up, making tea, checking the kids, that kind of thing.

Then I looked again. I looked at each bit of it and made a big list of those bits. A big list of stuff that happens in The Novel.

Terrible realisation: much of it is pants. Not all of it. Some bits I’m pleased with. But some bits are pants.

I want to tear the pants bits out, because they add nothing to the story. They just re-tell what the reader already knows or can infer. They treat the reader like a dummy. This is a Bad Thing.

But I fear the short novel. I worry that reducing The Novel from its current 89,721 words to (I guess) around 65,000 will reduce its artistic value. Surely this is nonsense. After all, The Commitments only ran to about 44,000 words. Espedair Street was 92,000 but not one of Banks’ best (in my humble, craven, worthless opinion). Length does not equal quality.

Repeat after me: length does not equal quality.

Sigh. Perhaps tomorrow I will begin trimming.

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A novel in the writing

I’ve added a new page here at NCAYBL, A novel in the writing. It contains the germ of an as-yet untitled novel that I’ve been chewing on for a couple of months. I’ve decided to do all the work on this particular fiction right here on the blog. Everything will be on that very page, all the notes, comments, editing, workings-out and dreadful mistakes. It’ll be an interesting experiment to see how it goes.

I’ve also decided to take a somewhat different approach to the way I write this one. Normally I’d spend quite a bit of time structuring a story. I’d know the characters, where they’ve been, who they are, what was going to happen, to whom, and when. Ultimately I’d know how the story ends. This time I’m going to avoid all that and just let the story write itself. The only thing I am seeding the story with is a mental image of the land within which the action occurs and a few ideas about the political landscape. Apart from that, it’s an open book (ha).

Ideas

So…

A pair of identity thieves team up with a ex-spook and a weird civil servant to investigate a serious identity fraud racket and uncover a plot that could shut down several major banks and shake the government. Hmm. It’s a bit like Hustle meets Spooks with a dash of Capital City (remember that, shoulder-pad fans?) An interesting but not very original idea for a TV drama script. Losing faith in that one at the moment.

Global aggression by a British Empire fueled by a wonder chemical that can heal injuries and reverse aging forces Depression-era America to act: invade or be subsumed. A novel idea that I’ve done quite a bit of work on but is going to require shedloads of research because I want it to be plausibly authentic. Still liking that one but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

A house full lodgers who all seem to do the same kind of job (something very stressful and occasionally disturbing, although we never discover quite what) find ever more bizarre ways of taking their minds off the horror of everyday life. An idea for a black comedy on TV, although it might work as a play. Very early days on that one, but I’ve got some strong visuals floating around my mind, particularly the Gary Numan theme dinner every Thursday evening. Darkly funny and utterly tragic in turns.

The last asylum for the insane, where we’re never quite sure who are the doctors and who are the patients; an island of weirdness, a forgotten tributary of the NHS, a kingdom without a king. Gormenghastesque in baroque complexity, the asylum building itself is the real star of the show. Most likely a novel but it’d be grand as a film script. Course, it’d never get made, not unless a crew with a Red One camera and a bunch of volunteer actors were willing to spend six months in abandoned Cane Hill Hospital.

A story of constant mega super turbo hyper action, where it’s constantly one thing after another; a car chase ends in a big crash which knocks over a crane which hits a boat which sinks which dislodges a mine which floats to the surface which bumps into a dock which explodes which hurls a shard of wood into the window of an office which kills a robber who was holding up some workers who then flee and so on. Unrelenting. Constant. Page after page. Zero characterisation. Just stuff. Probably get very boring after a while, but good for a giggle. Make an excellent no-brainer movie. It’d make Speed look Slow.

The hero (anti-hero?) of Zero Sum takes revenge on a crooked financial adviser who has been loan sharking the poor and needy just to supplement his gadget shopping addiction (he’s got a house full of flat screen TVs, sunbeds, exercise bikes, mobile phones, DVD players, the lot). The revenge? I won’t tell you the end, ‘cos I’m planning to write this one as a short story sometime soon. It’s a laugh, though.

The birth of an artificial intelligence as experienced by the AI itself, trapped unknowingly inside its own developing mind. In this story AIs are born slowly. They take some months to achieve self-realisation. Not all of them achieve it. This AI wakes up as a small child laying naked in the sunlit hallway of an large, empty house. The fact that it’s the birth of an AI is kind of irrelevant. It’s just another way of growing up, but condensed in time compared to the growth of the human mind. A novel, this one. Had the idea several weeks ago. Still like it, but I don’t have the full story yet.

A timid, lonely misfit of a man comes across a bundle of poorly photocopied papers. They purport to be the answer to all his problems; how to become confident, handsome, interesting; how to attract sexual partners, become wealthy, powerful. He takes it home then forgets about it. Then he is badly affected by…well, let’s say something bad happens to him. It comes down to fight or flight. In his darkest moments he rediscovers it and in desperation begins to follow the instructions. Everything changes, very quickly. A novel, but one for the future. The ingredients are on the shopping list but I haven’t been to the shops to see if they’re on the shelf.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a story:

Two trading scouts, their fiscal month’s tour complete, took lodgings for a night or two above a public house in Seahill-neath-Sky before commencing their return journey to the City and the interminable rounds of bureaucracy that would entail. The hostelry was occupied the live long day by never less than five horny-handed sons of the soil, each one sucking pungent tobacco fumes from unfeasibly long-stemmed clay pipes. They would compete in their gentle, underspoken way; jousting with one another ‘pon the height of their crop, the richness of the loam from which it sprang or – if no other agricultural criterion presented itself – the length and quality of their pipes. They all but ignored the trading scouts, who had taken up position either side of a small rickety table in the space created by the bay window at the front of the property. After all, once you have sold a yield to a scout in return for credit on your account there’s barely anything else you want to say to him.

This one I’ve been chewing over for a while. I have a feel for this world and the characters that live in it, but I don’t know what the story is. Perhaps this is the one I’ll choose to do a Cannery Row on; just open the pages and let the characters write their own stories. I’m no Steinbeck – far, far from it – but I love the idea of just writing for writing’s sake and not caring one jot for plot development or any of that bunk. I have considered building a novel bit by bit right here in the blog, all on one page. This might be the story I do that with.

A man wakes in a sumptuous bedroom and discovers he is in the centre of a royal city that occupies an entire island. He doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from. He remembers nothing beyond the last few hours. This island is in a world that is mostly water.  There are many other islands; each one is entirely covered by a habitation of some sort, from tiny ramshackle villages to grand cities. Each city has a cultural status. It is the innate objective of all inhabitants of this work to try to make their way from one island to the next, gaining cultural status and importance as they go. Many never even leave the island of their birth. The ultimate disgrace is to have to move down an island. Each time someone moves from one island to the next they must renew their identity, taking a new name and a new role in life. A novel. An idea from long back that I haven’t really spend any time developing. A bit Iain M. Banks, which is no bad thing but I hate the idea of just copying.

That’s it at the moment. I’ve got a few other notes and ideas but they’re either too disjointed to make a single coherent paragraph out of, or I have discarded them completely for one reason or another. One idea for a novel that I’d nurtured for years got blown out of the water when Heroes hit the screens. Bah humbug.

Right. All these ideas and stuff above are mine, my copyright. Don’t copy them, steal them or appropriate them in any other way. Mine. Mine mine mine. For what it’s worth.

The When and Where of Writing

I’ve always admired writers who are so dedicated to their art that they’ll give up a comfortable life in suburbia with local shops and off-licences to go and live in desolate leaky Welsh cottages where the electricity supply comes from a sheep on a treadmill. How the dramatic sunsets, windswept peaks and dark valleys must inspire them to ever-increasing heights of florid narrative. I imagine them cross-legged upon the blasted heather, moleskine propped on a granite boulder, ink pen poised like an antenna waiting to pick up the aetheric signals from a distant muse, stylishly long fringe flapping wildly in the breeze.

Me, I write where and when I can. I recently found myself writing a sex scene in the foyer of the Number 2 Cinema at the Barbican Centre. No films were being shown at the time, mark you; it was mid-day, lunchtime at the conference I was attending, and I was waiting for the next session to begin. A man sat silently in the cloakroom gazing at a magazine and a cleaning lady idly pushed a vacuum cleaner here and there, scaring the dust into the corners. Amidst this hive of activity I was observing a scene unravelling in the sultry night alongside a rich man’s swimming pool. With the rich man’s daughter. Upon finding myself thus I momentarily stopped writing and wondered whether my prose would have been any way improved by different surroundings. I can’t imagine it would; it’d have come out as well as (and notice how I avoid the terms ‘as brilliantly as’ or ‘as poorly as’ here) it ever would anywhere else.

Mind you, I wouldn’t write a sex scene anywhere. For example, I wouldn’t write one on the train for fear that someone was observing over my shoulder and categorising me as some new and unique kind of pervert that likes to abuse people by writing lurid fiction at them. Stranger things have no doubt happened on British Rail.

But I have to grab the chance to write when I can. Fortunately I can count the number of sex scenes I’ve written on the fingers of two fingers, so that leaves me free to spew out my normal verbiage just about anytime. It usually turns out to be a few minutes late at night, when all the other jobs of the day have been done. But even a minute or two can be enough to move The Novel a few inches forward, especially if I have been planning the next scene in my head over the washing-up. That’s when I get most of my plot ideas, when doing the washing-up. Perhaps when wielding the foamy scrubber I am sufficiently disengaged to allow the rusty old imagination to grind up to speed. (Perhaps I’m just inspired by greasy pans.) In fact, sometimes I’m so inspired I have to dash off and scribble some barely intelligible notes on a scrap of paper, post-it or shopping receipt. These – complete with suds and damp finger-marks – are folded into my mobile phone and left for later perusal. Why the phone? It simply doubles as a bulldog clip and fits in my pocket without jabbing me painfully in the leg.

I did once get an idea when I was out cycling but it turned out to be a poor one. At least, I haven’t been able to mould it into anything that I’d want to read myself, and that’s the final arbiter of whether to write it or not. Perhaps I should try some other slightly boring activities just to see whether I get some interesting ideas. Screwing the caps onto tubes of toothpaste. Mowing a remarkably large lawn. Picking the grit out of a shire horses’ hoof with a Swiss Army knife that doesn’t have the special attachment for removing things from horses’ hooves.

If you can think of any others, please tell me. I’m willing to give anything a try once.