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from the bottom of a very deep hole

It’s highly possible that by the time I get to the end of the first draft of this novel, all that I’ll have to show for it is the first draft of a novel. My home will be ripped apart by feral mice (they’ll become feral after eating the thyroid medication I’ve carelessly left lying around the place). Moths will turn all my clothes into lace. My phone and electricity will be cut off (obviously) and I will have to work by candlelight, except the mice will have eaten all the candles, which will turn out to be a good thing, as when the landlord turns up to evict me from this place, a huge waxy dead mouse will be wedged under the door, making it impossible to open or close. My friends will stop leaving me plaintive, slightly desperate messages about needing to ‘catch up soon!’ and ‘what do you mean you’re not coming to my wedding? You’re the bride!’

I will emerge from the writing of this first draft like something undead crawling out of its own grave. I will trudge around the streets, pressing my unedited manuscript into people’s hands, telling them they’re my favourite beta reader and asking them for spare change so I can buy stamps and send my work of genius out into the world where it is sure to cause a bidding war between the major publishing companies.  I will react to suggestions that I self-publish by setting my hair on fire.

One day I will go to sleep in a hollowed-out tree trunk, and when I wake up, some squirrels will be ripping up my manuscript and using it for bedding. Not even red squirrels, but those ordinary grey fuckers. I’ll fight them for the papers, incurring several painful bites and scratches, and ending up with nothing but a few scraps of soiled squirrel bedding and an incipient case of septicaemia which will quickly prove fatal. My remains will be found on a hillside, perhaps months later, bloated and green from the rain, a single piece of paper crumpled in my dead hand. The police officers who find me will attempt to prise the paper from my fist, but it will be nothing but mould and pulp. “Fucking writers,” they will say. “That’s the third one we’ve had this month.”

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something is squeaking

Something is squeaking in my room, and no no NO it is not my small bewhiskered friend Alphonse, he of the beret and the Gauloise and the stinky cheese. (I upset him by stuffing all the mouse holes with wire wool and peppermint-soaked cotton, and haven’t seen him since.) Maybe there is always something squeaking in my room at half past three in the morning. I wouldn’t really know because as a rule I am asleep at that time, with earplugs squeezed in my lugholes on account of all the outside noises I still haven’t gotten used to.

Maybe it’s my brain that’s squeaking. This book I’m writing has been kicking my arse lately, and insisting on getting me up in the middle of the absolute night if I want to achieve plenty wordage, which I do. Writing books is hard. It’s so hard it amazes me that anyone has ever actually managed to do it. It’s so supremely difficult that I can see now why some people will do anything but anything to avoid writing books, no matter how much they insist that’s what they really really want more than anything. I know plenty of ‘writers’ who don’t write. Edinburgh is seething with them. There’s a whole literature ‘scene’ in Edinburgh that pretty much seems like one big long excuse for not actually writing very much. (I put ‘scene’ in scarequotes because I wouldn’t want you to confuse it with an actual scene that’s like, you know, happening and groovy.)

You’d think there would be some kind of balance, a happy medium between poncing around on the ‘scene’ being a ‘writer’, and being awake at three-thirty in the morning fighting with your story-brain so hard that you are seriously considering attempting to persuade a mouse to write that tricky third act of your novel.

But that is not the squeak of a mouse. Perhaps it is the moon that is squeaking. Perhaps this is how the moon sounds: sharp and squeaky like a broken chair. A broken chair… Oh.

Oh, I see.

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how to write stuff and that

I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s kind of embarrassing. I’m making light of it, but it’s serious. I’m addicted to these:

Not just books in general, but books in particular. Books about writing, to be precise.

Last night, I counted. I have 37 books about writing, plus assorted reference books and works of criticism and theory. That’s a lot, right? That’s a crazy amount.

There are books on craft – plot, structure, character, point of view, genre… All these books say the exact same things, over and over until you basically want to kill yourself. Three and five act structure. Get to know your characters. Set the scene. Don’t overdo the exposition… blah blah blah let’s all die.

Then there are the big hitters: Story, by Robert McKee; Syd Field’s Screenwriting. Actually useful if you’re writing a film, although I do suggest getting the hardback edition of Story so that you can use it to beat yourself around the head when you finally watch Adaptation, and realise that some unspeakable genius has already processed the whole thing, turned it inside out, and written a film about it. And got Robert McKee to play himself in it, which is surely the icing on the cake of genius, and a good point at which to start beating yourself around the head.

There are books like Writing Down the Bones, which is perhaps the least helpful but most poetic book about writing ever written; books that polemicise and politicise the act of writing, like Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story; and writers’ memoirs, such as Stephen King’s On Writing, which is full of great practical advice and is highly entertaining and readable, too.

The Queen of books about writing has to be The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. This is the book that shames, bullies and goads writers into actually sitting down and working – and laughs in the face of those who think buying/reading books about writing is anything other than procrastination and avoidance of work. I recommend it. It’s worked for me, you know?*

*I’ve totally given them up, honest I have. Well, except that Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook is coming out soon, and I have to see the story fish. But that’s completely different. Completely!

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the egg

The blurb about me in the current Interzone mentions this short film from a while back, so I thought I’d post it up here for the curious. It’s based on one of the first decent(ish) short stories I ever wrote, and represents my first short story sale. Actually, this was the little story that could. First of all, it got me a place on an awesome screenwriting course, then it won first prize in a competition judged by Graham Joyce, and then I sold it to a film company. Honestly, watching the film now makes me cringe – for all the  bad writing they left in, and all the bad writing they added along the way. But despite its weaknesses, this story marks the moment when I became a real writer.

The Egg

 

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here i am

So the last few weeks have been crazy busy but yesterday I finally handed in three assignments, cleaned my flat (sort of), made dinner for some people, drank a lot of red wine and laughed a lot and rolled my eyes a lot at the silly things everyone was saying. And later I said goodbye to a friend who is leaving for America and never coming back. She gave me a load of stuff she didn’t want to take back with her, like curling tongs and a blanket and the biggest pack of q-tips I have ever seen. I said goodbye to her on my doorstep, and I wanted to say something big and important that she could hold on to, but I didn’t know what that might be and life isn’t really like that.

This morning I had a dream about being at a party with my best friend. We were about to go home, when another friend turned up and told us – you can’t go, I’ve got you some drugs. And the drugs were all completely legal, smart drugs. They were in the shape of big lozenges and they had words embossed on them, like Friends and Just Friends and Sweet. I had a ‘Friends’ and it made me feel really happy.

Then I woke up and I lay in bed the whole morning, reading a book. Because for the first time in weeks and weeks I didn’t have to get up and do things or worry about not having done the things. My course isn’t over yet, but it nearly is. Assuming I pass my assignments (not a given,) the worst of it is over. No more classes, none to speak of, anyway. I mean, I have to write a novel, but I would be doing that anyway. And I have two jobs now, so it’s not completely easy. But it feels like a big, horrible thing is finally done with, and now I can start to get over it.

So, here I am again.

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what i know

What I learned about writing this week is that you can research and plot and plan and outline and do all the preparation in the world, but when you actually start writing – that’s when you start to work out what your story is all about.

I’ve got my novel broken down scene by scene – a piece of work which took ages to do – but now I’m just looking at it and thinking, nope. That is not going to fly. That is not how this thing goes.

It’s just crazy how much you don’t know until you sit down and write. This novel is my major project for my MA and I’ve done everything ‘right’ – done everything I’ve been told to do – for what may be the first and only time in my life. But it’s come out all wrong. Because it’s only in the writing that the story reveals itself to you.

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slavering beasts: a manifesto

Is there anything more corporate, more soulless, more degraded than a brand? And yet, for years now, writers have been told that this is what we have to be. We have to have a USP and we have to not only produce products, but be products. Buy me! I’m a tin of beans writer.

What kind of writing does this generate? I don’t know, but there is something inherently dodgy about working on yourself as a kind of marketing project. Advertising is shady as hell. Its role is to perpetuate dangerous lies about what it means to be human. And writers and artists should be fundamentally in opposition to advertising – because we are supposed to work with true myths about the whatness of it all.

In advertising, the highest value is to be white, male, tall, rich, straight, Western, able-bodied, young and muscular. This image is King of the world. The children of the world are enslaved to this image: making his clothes and shoes, fighting in his wars, disposing of his toxic waste.

Writing is not supposed to prop him up. Writing is about releasing the ugly, slavering beasts who will find him out and tear him limb from limb.

But writers are told that we should build our brand and launch our products just as though we were nothing better than the marketing department of some shonky sports drink. As if all we want to do is sell units and move products and count our money with gleeful ha ha ha-ing. Of course, if you want to make it to the ha ha ha-ing, you have to write what sells. This is how capitalism neutralises the threat of art – it draws it in, co-opts it, and puts it in the service of big business. It makes the artist complicit.

Don’t comply. Don’t be a brand. Don’t use your talent to maintain the status quo. Write for the people who are fighting for something better. Write for children. Try to make a difference.

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questions about the death of the novel

There are writers who are still pissed off that the ebook ever happened. If you’re one of them, you probably shouldn’t read this post. It’ll only upset you. Because there are also writers who are already well over the ebook and looking for the next big thing. They think it’s our responsibility to find new and innovative ways to deliver fiction via digital platforms. These are the writers who say the novel is dying, and who want to be in the vanguard of the next big literary form.

See, for example, LitHacking, in which, potentially, a narrative is revealed to the reader via seemingly-genuine facebook updates, tweets, amazon reviews, the comments to blog posts and news articles, etc. See also The Silent History, which is advertised as ‘an entirely new kind of novel,’ though essentially, it’s just an ebook with optional ‘field reports’ that you can only release if you travel to the exact locations they’re set – in other words, an ordinary novel with some fancy/annoying add-ons.  And that’s about it, as far as examples go. And maybe that’s as far as they’ll ever go – but then again, maybe not.

Tech-savvy writers say the novel should be more interactive. (As if readers don’t already interact with novels.) But how interactive? When does a digital text stop being a story and start becoming a game? I would argue that LitHacking is a kind of game. The Silent History is a novel with a built-in game. And if that is where we’re heading, why this clinging to the old forms at all? Why not just say, the novel is dead – long live the computer game?

But there’s something else about these innovations that is less clearly understood, and that is how they blur the line between fiction and reality. Consider LitHacking. Not only does it create fake artefacts, but by doing so it calls into question the reality status of every other piece of text in its field. How would you know if a comment on a news article was a genuine opinion or a carefully placed clue in a puzzle? How would you interact with the internet if you were constantly unsure of the reality of what you were reading? LitHacking is ambitious, that’s for sure – take this logic to the extremes and you have a world wide web of fiction, with writers/hackers controlling everything from the sale of goods to the exchange of love letters.

A literary revolution, yes – perhaps more dramatic than any previously proposed. Its ultimate effect is to  make reality less trustworthy. In The Secret History, when you want to download a ‘field report’ you have to go to the exact location specified. You are physically completely interacting with the story in a real setting.This is not virtual reality. It’s difficult to know what’s real and what’s story if the story is taking place around you, outside your head and inside it at the same time.

And if that’s the case, how real are you, the reader? What happens to your ability to create and participate in the real world as a naive individual? When do you stop being a reader and start being a player? When do you start being a character? When does that begin to happen against your will? Or is it already happening? And what does that mean in terms of your capabilities and responsibilities?

But there’s something else that goes beyond this. Not only does this make reality less real, but by blurring the boundaries of story/reality, it makes fiction less fictional. The project of fiction has historically been to increase, deepen, intensify and enlighten reality. It has made us more human, connected us to the real world outside of our heads, shown us the reality of other humans who exist or existed before us. By forcing fiction into existing reality, do we run the risk of losing that expansionist vision of what stories are for? Do we ruin stories by making everything a story?

This all seems very avant-garde, but advertisers already use the internet in much the same way that LitHackers propose writers should: creating fake reviews for books and products, using comments to push sales, creating youtube videos in the hope that they’ll go viral. What’s to stop advertisers intervening in LitHack narratives in order to promote their products? What’s to stop businesses setting up shop in the exact locations where readers congregate to download ‘field reports’? And when does this complicated exchange go too far? Will writers be pushed aside by salespeople? And is there anything in these new forms – any idea of artistry, politics, reality – that can protect us from that?

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and many more

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!

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imagineering

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.