the monstrous home of georgina bruce
I was well chuffed to see that I’m one of the ‘many more’ in this anthology.
The talented and hardworking Steve Berman told me that my story was a lot cheaper to get than Stephen King’s. (I figured.) Bad Seeds comes out in July, but you can pre-order it here. So, go and do that!
When you write a lot of short stories, your process tends to be mainly thinking, walking, intuiting, imagining – and then writing. Or the other way around. After one, two, or a few drafts, you ask your trusted beta readers to look for all the things that are wrong with your story, and you fix those. It might take a long time or not long at all. You might need to put the story away for a while. You might be working on a story that you don’t quite understand yet, and have to put it away for a very long while. But in essence, the process is simple. You think, write, revise. It’s not hard to keep it all in order inside your head.
Novels are a different kettle of fish. You can’t keep a kettle of fish inside your head. Trust me, I’ve tried.
When I first conceived of this novel, I had no idea how much planning would go into it, and I definitely had no idea how much I would enjoy it, particularly the research. It’s fun! You start to develop a familiarity with the available resources in a particular field, to recognise names and dates, and to feel the beginnings of a sort of expertise that is interesting in and of itself. This is very far removed from academia: it feels practical and urgent. After all, it serves a specific purpose. It’s not knowledge for its own sake, but it connects up a network of ideas and hunches that are part of what underpins your artistic creation.
So, it’s very cool. Even painstakingly setting out a scene breakdown for your entire novel is cool. It’s a fragile, interconnected structure that demands every piece of information find its own rightful place, the place where it can make an impact. Everything has to be proportionate. Everything has to be balanced so that it supports the structure’s internal strength. It’s not ‘plotting’, but a feat of imaginative engineering.
Writing short stories trains you to create work in a certain way. It trains you to focus in on intimate, metonymic images. You become adept at suggesting a whole world from a single moment. But a novel asks you to do something utterly different. It asks you to build reality from scratch. It asks you to create a machine that is capable of generating a whole world. And if you want that world to be strange, if you want meaning to reside in the gaps, absences and interstices of that world (as it does in reality) then you are necessarily working with something complex. You need to develop a sensibility akin to an engineer who knows that if her calculations are a fraction of a degree off, we’re all going to die in a fiery explosion. You have to think it matters.
The trouble with research is that EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING. I mean, everything is really interesting. I start off looking for stuff about sisters, and end up reading a mother’s account of how her son went crazy smoking too much weed. Or I try to find out about religious music, and end up reading about anchorites and tithes. (Actually, this latter is an abiding interest of mine, and there’s always a temptation to delve deeper.) I research strokes, and find out about painting. It’s a demonstration of how all knowledge is dependent upon all other knowledge. It’s fractal-shaped: you can start anywhere and travel a million miles along fronds and petals that replicate and spawn their own fronds and petals to investigate. (Fractals: I am also obsessed with fractals.)
I would like some kind of brain implant that allows me to upload the contents of books directly into my knowledge centres. Maybe this will be the next Kindle upgrade. It would certainly make everything quicker. Time is of the essence, because my schedule demands that I finish the first draft of this novel within the next few months. I can understand, though, why so many writers get stuck at this stage. There is no natural end point to researching a novel. You can just keep going. All you need is a library card and an open mind.
In the meantime, let me share a little gem from my current researches. This is from a book called ‘Shadows as Bright as Glass’ by Amy Ellis Nutt, which tells the story of Jon Sarkin’s massive, life-transforming stroke. She describes how in the 1930s a surgeon called Abse was rummaging around in someone’s brain, looking for a tumour, squeezing bits of brain tissue and prodding stuff (this is how those old-time surgeons rolled) when the patient, who was nearing death, suddenly became alert and called out: “You sod, leave my soul alone. Leave… my… soul… alone.”
Pretty freaky stuff.
Oh how I neglect you, my poor little blog. Truth be told, I haven’t had a huge amount of fun things to write about yet this year, what with a freezing apartment, money worries, school assignments left til the last minute (of course!), work problems, health problems, family problems, crazy/neurotic/unpleasant/violent people being in/fucking up my life problems – all the problems really. But! It is a new year, and though completely arbitrary, it does feel like a time to change stuff, make plans, and renew commitments.
So, with that in mind, I’m seeing 2013 as a year of massive opportunity for me. This is the year that I write and sell my first novel. This is the year I get an agent. This year, I’m going to sell a minimum of twenty stories (two sold so far!) and get placed in at least one major competition.
This may also be the year of other things, maybe some not so nice things, but I’ll deal with those as and when necessary. If there’s one thing that 2012 has taught me it’s that I’m really fucking tough. Negative people just need to stand back now and let me do my thing.
The whole world looks like sucked candy. Hard candy, pitted with holes, softening under a rough tongue. The cathedral dissolves in the rain, collapses into sludge and drifts in the gutter. The soft gutter. The sticky road.
Gretel breathes. In for a count of three, hold, let it out slowly. It isn’t working. Her feet sink into warm fudge. She panics, she always does, can’t help it. In her deepest unconscious she has never left the gingerbread house. She is still there, licking the walls.
Compulsively, she checks her pockets for crumbs. But she has left them at home, on the instructions of her therapist. Trust in reality, he said. But how can she? Even he admits, the grim Herr Doktor, that reality is a confection, no a construction, no, confection is right; it’s all in their minds, in their mouths, did he say? Reality is a confection in the mouth.
Would it hurt to break off a little in her hand, a little to eat? The soft, chewy corner of a road sign, or the wing mirror of a shiny toffee car. You can’t eat this world, says Herr Doktor, leaning on his striped candy cane. But finally, Gretel thinks, she must. Even this world, dry and hard and sour, metal and concrete and dirt; in the end she will eat it all. Every last bite.
This is the course I’m doing at the moment. When I was deciding whether to apply for this course, it was pretty hard to get any information or opinions from current/ex-students. It really might have been helpful to have some other points of view. So, if you’re thinking about doing this course, feel free to email me and ask me questions. Obviously I can only describe my experiences and give you my opinions, but sometimes it’s useful to have a variety of sources of information. It’s a big decision and a big deal and I’m happy to help if I can.
Lots of folks lately writing about professional jealousy. I don’t suffer from it and I’m not just saying that. Jealousy happens when you are not living up to your own expectations and having fun with your own writing. Then you start to look at other people and wonder what they’ve got that you haven’t. If you stay focused on your own writing, you don’t have this problem. Easy as that!
Of course, it’s never really quite as easy as that. Writing is such a complicated and fragile thing. Given the choice, the last thing we would do is commercialise and monetise something so fundamental to our wellbeing. It’s a skewiff, wonky old world, and if you get wound up from time to time it’s hardly surprising. In fact, it would be bizarre if you didn’t. A lot of writers are a bit bonkers in the noo noo and that’s to be expected.
But. There are things worth getting worked up about, and then there are other things. How well or badly another writer is doing falls firmly into the category of ‘other things’. It’s a waste of time and energy and creativity we could be directing towards our work.
Writers don’t always like one another, for a variety of reasons, but we at least ought to aim for mutual support and appreciation wherever possible. Indulging in jealousy, rivalry, and competition is negative and counter-productive. Far better to make friends with people who may be able to help you out someday, than to be a git to someone who could one day be in a position to crush you underfoot. And there’s simply no point in wasting time fuming about another writer’s success when you could be sitting down and getting on with your own work. Innit.
The illustrious and talented Robert Shearman visited us this morning and gave an inspiring talk about short stories. He said some very insightful and helpful things, which I’m not going to repeat here because if you want to hear his great advice you should probably be paying him a lot of money for it. But one of the things I’ll take away from his talk is the way he spoke with such great passion, humour and love about reading and writing short stories. I love reading and writing short stories, too! I forgot how much.
At the moment I’m writing a novel, something which I have failed to do many, many times. This is a big part of the reason I wanted to do a creative writing MA – I needed to make a serious commitment to a major writing challenge. And I’m working on a big, difficult project that I have a lot of love for. I think it could be ace – as long as I don’t fuck it up.
But writing short stories is completely different for me. It isn’t remotely like work. It’s something I love to do and will always do. Maybe I’ll write a string of novels and they’ll all be brilliant and win awards and acclaim, and I’ll retire on my massive earnings and spend the rest of my days quaffing champers and commissioning life-size portraits of myself – the normal writer’s life, don’t you know. Whatever. I’m always going to be writing short stories, no matter what happens next, just because that’s what I love to write.
It’s depressingly easy to get sucked into the world of academia and trying to understand clever things that people say and trying to get people to give you nice grades for your writing. We all lose perspective in the face of that stuff. So it’s great to have someone come along and fire loads of enthusiasm and joy at you. And make you remember why it is you’re doing this in the first place.
The fantastically talented Priya Sharma tagged me in this blog-chain, and I now have to subject you to my thoughts about my own brilliance or otherwise in the form of a handy Q & A.
Now for the tagging. I’ve picked on Henry Szabranski and Gio Clairval – two members of my secret BRILLIANT writing group. There were others I wanted to tag but who were already taken. If you’re reading this and wishing I would have tagged you, let me know. I’ll do it! Anything for you!
LOTS of people wrote and called to tell me how wrong I am about the present tense. Here’s my response to your responses:
1. I do not wish to eliminate the present tense.
2. Stories and novels written in the present tense can be stunningly beautiful and original.
3. It takes a lot of skill for someone’s present-tense prose not to sound like everyone else’s present-tense prose.
4. But of course it is completely possible.
5. Using the present tense because it is the best possible choice for your story is perfectly valid.
6. Using the present tense when there is a better choice for your story, simply because present-tense prose is your default mode, is a shame.
7. The ability to fully control and manipulate all available tenses is an essential element of craft.
8. The previous blog post, and this follow up, are directly almost entirely at myself and issues that I identify with my own writing.
9. That is what this blog is all about.
10. I reserve the right to change my mind about any of this, and everything else, too.
11. For those of you into the number 11, I thought I’d better add an extra point. You’re welcome.