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present complicated

Let’s skim over the fact that I haven’t posted anything here for yonks, and talk about present tense instead. I am so over my love affair with the present simple. I really wish everyone else would get over theirs, too.

I know why people like writing in present simple so much – it’s because it automatically gives you a ‘voice’, a style. Used in conjunction with short sentences and a few too many conjunctions, it creates the impression that you are actually writing. She looks up. The bird circles, its wings outstretched like grey sails. It soars and dips and lifts upwards and she thinks she can see her own reflection in its shining eyes and beak. Then it poos on her head. (Sorry. I am a child.)

The trouble with this is that it isn’t really writing. It’s a cheat. Sounds poetic and deep and meaningful, but in exactly the same way that everyone else’s present-tense prose sounds poetic and deep and meaningful. It’s a formula. And behind the formulaic prose is hidden, I sometimes suspect, an ignorance of how to write any other way.

It is surprisingly easy to write a short story in the present tense, but I am not sure it is often justified. I’ve written plenty of things that read more or less like the example above, and so has almost every other writer I know. Why? Because it’s so easy! Your writing seems all beautiful and metaphorical, and you never have to sit there and work out why you’re doing it. Why does this need to be told in the present tense? Why am I not using any of the other 11 tenses in the English language? (Or is it two tenses with various voices, moods, and aspects? No need to answer that, grammar police, as I don’t actually care.) And, an especially interesting question: why doesn’t it bother me that my prose reads almost identically to every other writer’s present-tense prose?

People claim that the present tense gives a sense of immediacy, but in fact it does exactly the opposite. It creates an atmosphere of distance, timelessness, fairytale-ness and ungrounded-ness (which are all completely real words, thank you very much.) In everyday life, we use the present simple to talk about things that are usually or always true, facts, things that stay the same for a long time. We might use it to accent a story, or even to tell a whole one, if we are particularly dull speakers, but more often we use it to give instructions, lectures, describe the workings of the internal combustion engine. If you want immediacy in your writing, the present simple will not do. It will bog you down and keep pulling you back to its same voice and everything you write will sound the same as everything else you write and everything else that other people write. It will inevitably fall upon the spectrum of mild to gross pretentiousness. And you will never learn how to control your storytelling using all the tools that are available in the language.

Of course there are stories which demand distance, timelessness etc. But not every story does. A writer has to make choices about tense, not just default to present simple without considering the needs of the story.

Yes, there are a few writers who can make any prose brilliant, and there are several stories written in present simple which I love unreservedly. So there’s no need to accuse me of being some kind of tense-fascist, even though I might be one. Of course there is a place for the present simple in all kinds of prose and poetry. In general, however, I am far more impressed with writers who deploy the full range of tenses, who can use four or five tenses in a paragraph, and who do it so skilfully that you don’t even notice, or you do notice and it makes you swoon. That is hard to do. That takes craft and application and a huge amount of failure. That is a level of mastery to which I aspire.

Feel free to tell me how much you disagree with me in the comments.

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dream diary entries

I found a couple of old dream diaries the other day. They are chock full of weird dreams. The three I picked out below are not the weirdest, but they’re pretty odd. I present them entirely unedited, because how could I improve on these gems?

Saturday 5th May 2007 – Dreamt I was Steve McQueen. Was fighting Nazis on a cliff top, the sea below us. At one point I went to the bottom of the cliff and put my feet in the absolutely clear cool sparkling water. Was overwhelmed by longing to have my feet in that water. The Nazis flew over the top of the cliff in formation, dressed in giant penguin suits.

22nd October 2007 – Dreamt I was lying in bed and next to me was a largish black soft kitten. For some reason I thought I had to kill it, and attempted to do so by bashing it on the head with half a house brick. It went all woozy but didn’t die. I didn’t want it to die but I thought maybe now I’d hurt it so much that I’d have to kill it. But I loved the kitten and I felt that the kitten loved me. I held its soft paw in my hand, and prayed that it would live.

Wednesday 26th March 2008 – I’m a child. A man takes me and my brother away. The man is a martial artist. He regularly beats us in martial arts practice. One day he gives us some blue sticks. Mine has feathers on. He comes and tries to hit us with his own blue stick. I manage to capture his stick and get it away from him. He cries. The next day he allows me to start school with the other children and brings me schoolbooks. He’s not my father but we pretend he is. My name is Laura Henderson. My brother is small. He’s the one I am protecting, but we always misunderstand one another.

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no good

I am sometimes scared of writing. I am scared of what might happen if I just wrote what I wanted to write without even considering whether it is good. Because I always think so much about whether it’s good. I think about it so much that sometimes I can’t write anything at all. Or I twist myself into terrible shapes to try to write something good that hides the truth of what I really want to say. I don’t know what writing is for. Only it should make you feel better when you do it. But maybe I’m wrong about that, and it’s not supposed to make you feel better. Maybe it’s for something else entirely. Maybe it’s something a little bit mysterious, which needs a little bit of love. Or maybe that’s just me.

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fingers

Her fingers called her in the middle of the night. The telephone rang – it woke her – and she sat up, blinded by darkness, and reached out her hand for the receiver. Pressed it, cold against her ear. It was them, her fingers. They played Beethoven to her.

It happened every night. In the morning, she looked at her hands and counted the digits and wondered how her fingers could be living this double life. Sometimes she sat down at the piano in the TV lounge and placed her fingers on the keys, but nothing came of that. Only plink plink plink crash, and the shooting pains that went from her fingertips all the way up through her arms, to her heart. Then she would take as many of the prescription painkillers as she dared, laying them out in ranks on her bedside table. One for sorrow, two for joy… a third and a fourth… and then her hands would be completely numb and useless.

Beethoven. It was always Beethoven. She had used to like Philip Glass, but her fingers liked to play the Moonlight Sonata. She knew they were her fingers, because they stumbled in just the places she always had. There was that terrible third. She remembered the sharp rap of her teacher’s voice: Adagio! Adagio! At least that was all over now.

But was it over? Why did her fingers telephone every night? Were they trying to tell her something, and if so, what was it? Sometimes she whispered into the receiver: if you can hear me, tell me what it is you want. But her fingers just carried on playing, on and on, until she either put down the phone or fell back to sleep listening to the music.

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the flame alphabet

The Flame Alphabet may be the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. The fact that it is beautifully written only adds to the nasty queasy feeling one is left with at the end. The sense of being made complicit in a series of cruel acts. I’ve never read a book which contains so much that is wrong and off and weird in the most unpleasant ways. Oh, but it is brilliant.

The subject of the novel is language. When language becomes toxic and lethally unspeakable, unhearable, and unreadable, all relationships fall apart, and love itself becomes impossible. Society breaks down, and the post-apocalyptic world is characterised by an inhuman desperation to re-connect with one another. That’s a very basic summary of the plot. The strangeness of the setting, the twisted Heath Robinson-esque contraptions deployed by the narrator in his efforts to cure himself of language illness, the secret cult of the Forest Jews who listen to sermons through flesh-like ‘listeners’ attached to cables underneath the earth, the scripts and signs that are also diseased – this all makes for a very odd novel full of thematic richness. But the most disturbing elements of the book are to do with parenthood, with fatherhood, to be precise. And in many ways, the novel is traditional – it has a protagonist and a plot, a beginning, middle and end. Yet there is something absolutely surreal and estranging about the writing that washes you up somewhere very far from home.

This novel made me feel slightly sick, if I’m honest. I appreciate that this is a meta-message – language is toxic – but mainly, I just feel a bit ill.

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mind your language?

I was involved in a pub discussion the other night about whether certain extremely offensive words are okay to say and use, if you are not personally offended by those words or sitting next to someone who might be. One side of the argument claimed that words are neutral – if they hurt, it’s because of the speaker’s intention to hurt/the hearer’s allowing the words to hurt her. Another side was saying, words have power and meaning that they carry with them, regardless of who is speaking. A question was raised as to whether it’s possible to subvert the meaning of such words, or whether they should be unspoken and neglected until they fall out of usage.

My opinions don’t completely line up anywhere in this argument. Of course words have power of their own – some words carry a great deal of history and meaning with them. And we know that intentions aren’t all that matter – it’s the reader/listener who completes the meaning. So writers/speakers do have a responsibility to consider that the words they are using mean more, lots more, than they may want those words to mean. That’s why claiming the ‘right’ to use a word, just because it is a word in the language, isn’t as straightforward as it might be. People talk about freedom of speech – but what do you do when your freedom of speech forces another person/group of people into silence, or into inhabiting a marginalised position? I don’t know the answer to this.

On the other hand, powerful words derive their power from real social relations. There are highly unpleasant words used against women, for example, but getting rid of any of these words doesn’t eradicate misogyny. If there were no misogyny, there would be no hateful words used against women, and words which are now vile to us may persist but would no longer be vile.

There is also the question of context. Who is speaking, and when, and why? A group of women might use all sorts of language amongst themselves that would be offensive/threatening/nasty when used by a group of men, or called out in the street, or graffitied on a wall.

More convincing than any of this, for me, is the fact that I cannot speak some words without feeling faintly repulsed. The words themselves are toxic. You can see them having a physical effect on people who hear them, too. Something happens when these words are summoned into conversation. Something physically happens to people – they react bodily. That’s not a political argument, and more level-headed rationalists would probably dismiss it as twaddle of the worst kind. But it is true. A word aimed at you can make you shrink back, can make you cry, blush, fill you with adrenalin. Some words really hurt.

I’ve been reading ‘The Flame Alphabet’ by Ben Marcus, a novel in which the whole of language is toxic, where language can be used as a weapon to injure, sicken and kill. Children are immune to the toxicity of language, and it is they who hurt and kill their parents and others around them. Their motives are not really explored, and I suggest that this is because it’s motiveless to an extent. The children don’t make war on their parents for any rationalised reason. They do it because they can’t help it, because they must use language, must speak, and must say whatever they want to say. I’m interested in the idea that language has an existence of its own, like a virus that seeks to perpetuate itself by any means it can. If that is the case, our discussions about language are kind of pointless, except in that they keep reproducing language, which is only thing language itself cares about.

 

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time will tell

So I was given an an assignment I really didn’t want to do. Write a diary entry from the perspective of your eighteen year old self. I didn’t want to do it for a number of reasons, none of which I care to rehearse here, all of which can be boiled down to, ‘stop taking everything so seriously, George.’

I’ve been thinking a lot about my eighteen-year-old self and where she is now. What happens to our selves as we get older? I mean, in my case, I became incredibly cool and popular, but does that mean my awkward, brash, unloved eighteen-year-old self is gone? Did I eat her? Or did she eat me, and that’s how she got older?

It should be clear already that I don’t have a clue how time works. But if, as the scientists say, all time is happening at the same time, then my eighteen year old self is right now existing just as much as I am. If she is existing now, then do the things I say and write about her affect her subconsciously? Does she have terrible dreams because I keep sending tendrils of story at her? Do I have terrible dreams because she is sitting in another room with a knife? How does it work – are there an infinite number of parallel universes in which every possible version of ourselves exists? That’s what they say, right? Every instant is happening right now, and somehow I am travelling through space, through the membranes between the worlds, and that’s what I’m calling time? If we could stop feeling time, would we be more than we are? Would we be all our selves at once? Or would the universe cease to exist?

Here’s a big question with no useful answer. What’s the difference between time and narrative? Because the way I see it, the only difference between me and my eighteen-year-old self is the story I am telling myself about myself and the world. (And, obviously, that I grew into my good looks.)

Time probably doesn’t work like this at all and I’m an idiot. Although I expect that the people who laugh at me for my unscientific and bizarre notions about time also don’t know anything about how it works or indeed what it is. Even scientists have to admit that time is made of language, and so it is a writer’s prerogative to wonder just how the hell it works, even if she makes herself look silly in the process.

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not dead, just resting my eyes

Currently reading Barthes’ Death of the Author, which is not as much fun as the title would seem to suggest, given that no one actually dies in it. However, it is the prompt for some high dudgeon and dramatic outbursts. I overheard one of my fellow students referring to Barthes as “our enemy – the one who wants us all to disappear…” A very interesting construction to put on this text, the premise of which is unnecessarily obscure, but not especially controversial. He’s just saying, it’s about language, it’s not about you. Get over yourself. Right?

 

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happiness

As of yesterday, I am officially a student again. There’s something a bit ridiculous about that, given that I am so ancient and curmudgeonly and prone to delivering rants about the gruesomeness of students and young folk in general. And yet. Here I am.

There was a get-out-of-jail-free opportunity on Thursday morning when, after being welcomed by the course tutors, and praised for getting places on such an elite and unique programme, my fellow students and I were invited to leave. “No shame,” they said, and they meant it. “Leave before you give us any money.” I thought seriously about the proposition. Was I there for the right reasons? Would I be able to cope with the work? Was I ready for this? The tutors asked us some searching questions, and I, in turn, searched myself for the answers. I promised myself that I would leave if it was the right thing to do, and I would have, too. This is not the right course for everyone – but for me, it’s perfect.

It helps that the Napier programme is so ridiculously awesome. It is unlike any other creative writing course in the known universe. There are no workshops where students critique each others’ work – you can do that in your spare time. On the course, we get feedback from experienced writers, editors and agents. There’s no poetry component, and no literary snobbery. Instead, we are challenged to improve our writing by putting it into theoretical contexts, by experimenting with form, content, genre, style, tone; by focusing on structure, point of view, and all the other nuts and bolts of writing as a craft. No one is asking you to express yourself, find your voice or confront your emotional pain in some kind of voyeuristic pseudo-therapeutic ‘safe’ space. What they do ask of you is a serious commitment to the course, and to your own writing career, and to yourself as a writer. It is incredibly exciting and I feel stupidly lucky that I’ve got the chance to be a part of this.

If you think I’m exaggerating how good this course is, I’m sorry. I’m underplaying it, because I don’t want you to be jealous. I’m going to be a better writer – immeasurably better – and I am off my head with happiness.

 

 

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I can give up any time I want

Hey there! Long time no wotsit! I’m on a train at the moment, so if this all seems a bit wobbly to you, that would certainly explain it.

So. You know how a while ago I was banging on how about the internet is a terrible distraction and how I was going to not have the internet and it was all going to be great? Yeah, well. I have come to my senses and realised that I can no more manage without the internet than I could manage without teabags or eggcups, or any of the other basic human needs. I am currently in a state of waiting/longing for someone to come and hook me up to the world, which is going to happen in about four weeks’ time. Four weeks! I called them and explained how that was too very long and I cry my eye, but they remained unmoved and insisted that four weeks is exactly the same as the ten days they had originally promised me, but that they would certainly ‘log’ my ‘complaint.’ Thank you very much, not. Also, all your trains smell of wee wee.

It’s true, of course, that the internet is an awful problem for writers. Then again, a lot of things are awful problems for writers, not least the fact that they feel compelled to make stuff up and pretend it’s really really serious and true. Why should I pick on the internet as being especially bad? When there it is being really useful, and having Eastenders on all the time, and making nice pingy noises when I have an email. I’m so sorry I ever doubted you, the internet.

Because of the lack of internet, I have been forced to read more books than normal, which also means I’ve had to buy more books than normal, as most of my books are still in boxes in another country. Here’s a few of my favourites from the last fortnight:

The Beginner’s Goodbye – Anne Tyler. If you don’t already know Anne Tyler’s novels, then I feel very jealous of you. Start with The Accidental Tourist, or perhaps Saint Maybe.  But you must definitely also read her new novel, which is quite beautiful and brilliant. The opening line alone is worth the cover price, but what I loved about it most was the devastatingly cool way she used a first person narrator to tell both sides of a marriage. So clever. The novel also has a strong speculative element, which I liked a lot.

The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark. It pisses me off that the writers’ museum in Edinburgh is obsessed with those three old farts: Scott, Stevenson and Burns. No one cares about Walter Scott, although his monument is rather impressive. And as for Robbie Burns! All I can ever recall of his is “Nine inches will please a lady,” which is simultaneously wrong and deeply unpoetic. I don’t really understand why the Writers’ Museum doesn’t seem to care about all the amazing Scottish writers, such as Muriel Spark. This novel (novella, really) is a very sinister and disturbing crime story, turned inside out. Muriel Spark had a great talent for creating unpleasant people, but in the end, your sympathies are turned very much around.

So I Am Glad – A L Kennedy. Oh. This woman can write anything, everything, and knocks pretty much all other Scottish writers into a cocked hat. ‘So I Am Glad’ is a comedy, but it’s also very touching, and is peopled by completely real yet utterly preposterous characters. The narrator is absolutely believable, even though her story is deeply suspect. I don’t want to give the plot away – not even the premise – because it is so deliciously bizarre and unique. Just read it.

The Silver Wind – Nina Allen. Her style rather reminds me of Christopher Priest – which is a pretty big compliment as far as I’m concerned. These five interlinked stories about people’s obsession with time creates an intriguing puzzle of a novella. A shame that the mystery is somewhat dampened by an indulgent and unnecessary epilogue. Then again, it’s rare to find a really clever and interesting novel that deals with time travel and parallel universes, and this is a real treat.

What are you reading? Feel free to recommend something in the comments.