Category: Writing

I've recently been thinking a lot about writing, and why I do it. I found myself returning to the columns I wrote in 2009 for the Literature Network. I still agreed with most of the things I had written, but was most interested in the post How many readers do you need?. This argued that people should aim at a small, realistic level of 'fame' rather than all-or-nothing success. As the writer Douglas Coupland put it, "there is a lot to be said for having a small, manageable dream". It's easier to build larger dreams on the foundations of simpler ones.

I drew on an essay by Momus, Pop Stars? Nein Danke, which claimed that in the future "everyone will be famous for fifteen people". Danny O'Brien explored similar issues in How many people do you need to be famous for?

I concluded my piece by saying "There's nothing wrong with being famous for fifteen people. JK Rowling was once less famous that that. Finding those 15 true fans is the first step towards millions of true fans, and is far better than none." Re-reading the essay over a year later, I find the ideas as interesting as I did when I wrote it. But I also find myself wondering: what constitutes a fan? How would this differ from, say, a friend who reads your work?

My story A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand has been published on Everyday Fiction this morning. It's a piece  about a ventriloquist's funeral which I have performed live several times:

"I was supposed to meet my family a couple of hours before the funeral, but I arrived late because of work. Everyone smiled when they saw me and I soon found out why: in my absence they’d decided I would be doing the eulogy."

I hope you enjoy it.

Today I finally finished Swansong, the novel I've been working on in Derbyshire. While the manuscript undoubtedly contains a few spelling mistakes and odd errors, there are no bugs that I am aware of.

I started working on Swansong when I was in Coventry, although I first had the idea at University (when I was at University the first time, that is, doing my BSc). The novel has turned out very different from what I first planned, but I think it's stronger for that. It has been fascinating to work on – the research has led to some fascinating conversations and I've met some interesting people.

I've learned a lot from writing this novel. One lesson is to be more careful with research. I spent too long gathering material rather doing the specific research that the novel needed. Hopefully I can avoid this in future by planning the second half of the book better – which would also have prevented a couple of the rewrites. Having said that, I'm very excited about some of the secrets I uncovered through doing the research.

FWIW, Swansong is not the first novel I've written. I wrote some appalling messes in my twenties, that have now been permanently deleted. There is also The Clown Novel, which I finished last year, but that feels a little too depraved to unleash upon the world. Swansong is the first novel I've written that I feel reasonably happy with. I'm now going to send the book to my initial alpha-reader for their comments. Then I'm taking the rest of the day off.

I have a new story available online, in the latest issue of Streetcake Magazine. The story is called The Dirty Bits and was read at Short Fuse's erotic fiction night last year. As the continuity announcers like to say, it contains strong language from the beginning.

It's a fairly experimental story, featuring 'samples' from Anais Nin and Georges Bataille and was an interesting piece to read in public. Issue 11 of streetcake magazine is available from here.

A story of mine, In the Night Supermarket… is one of ten short horror stories that will be appearing in the next issue of Black Static Magazine:

"Ellen always comes to the
supermarket after two, when it’s quiet. She used to have terrible
nightmares but late night shopping keeps them away."

The story was entered as part of the Campaign for Real Fear run by Christopher Fowler and Maura McHugh. I can't wait to see the magazine – firstly, because it's so exciting to be appearing in a magazine that I've been subscribing to for a couple of years. Also, as I said in my last post, I can't wait to read the other stories the Campaign has produced. Hopefully it should arrive in the next couple of weeks.

My latest article, Why Bother Writing? is now up on the Literature Network site. It was written in January, when I was preparing to leave for India:

"I carry a book everywhere I go but it’s only when lugging whole boxes of them that you become aware of how heavy text is. I’ve slimmed my library down massively and it’s still too heavy. I think back to the rumours that my university library is sinking under the weight of the text inside. The story wasn’t true, but it sounds like it could be."

The article is about Twitter, phatic communication, and what the point is in writing in a world that already contains so many books.

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an essay on spies, looking at  Operation Mincement and whether secret intelligence can be trusted. Gladwell discusses the British spy agencies and their logical minds, comparing them to James Jesus Angleton, head of the CIA's counter-intelligence division during the cold war:

"His nickname was the Poet. He corresponded with the likes of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams, and he championed William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He co-founded a literary journal at Yale called Furioso. What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism… To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, in a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors."

Gladwell describes intelligence information as a poem, with 'multiple interpretations'. I love the idea of applying literary theory to spycraft. It reminds me of a section in Don DeLillo's White Noise (a book I recently quoted when posting about the Taj Mahal):

"My first and fourth marriages were to Dana Breedlove … She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. … The long novels kept arriving in the mail."

I found a Telegraph blog post which notes that the CIA did in fact review Norman Mailer's book 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago' as part of their file on him. The New Yorker writes that "agents filed classified reports about Mailer’s appearances, talks, and lectures" and described his Miami book as "written in his usual obscene and bitter style".

If I could pick any job in the world, it would have to be reviewing literature for intelligence agencies. I suspect, though, it's not a job you can just apply for.

I'm very excited today, because a story I wrote, In the Night Supermarket… has been selected by the Campaign for Real Fear following their recent competition.

The Campaign for Real Fear is run by Maura McHugh and Christopher Fowler. The Campaign began with a blog post by Maura, Horror Wants Women to Scream But Not Talk, about a recently released collection of interviews with horror writers which contained only men. In addition to attacking such maginalisation of women in horror, the Campaign wants "diversity in themes, characters and monsters. It’s time to promote a twenty-first century horror sensibility, one that explores what scares us most in our rapidly changing world."

While I'm delighted to be selected, I'm equally looking forward to reading the other entries. Writing in the last issue of Black Static, Christopher Fowler said "…we hope it will eventually lead, as it did in the heady experimentalism of the 1960s, to new writing and a fresh perspective".

As I teenager I loved horror writing. Not for the gore, but because writers like Clive Barker did things with words and stories I'd not seen before. I spent long afternoons digesting anthologies, excited by the techniques used and the possibilities of what writing could do. I love the idea of experimental horror writing, and I've been playing with that idea a lot since submitting my entry. What would New Worlds horror be like?

Initially there ten stories were going to be selected, but this has been expanded to twenty. The stories will appear as podcasts from Action Audio, as well as being printed in the next two issues of Black Static.

In a stunning feat of derring-do, poet Tim Clare is attempting to write 100 poems today. Tim Clare is a talented performance poet, who recently played a great set at Hammer&Tongue. He was also part of the show Found in Translation, which I saw in London last year, and the writer of We Can't All Be Astronauts, a lovely book about not being a bestselling writer.

In his blog, Tim has talked about speed poetry, where groups of poets write new work in 10 minutes. This is something I'm very interested in after my experiments with Write Club. In one recent post, Mr. Clare talked about the benefits of speed writing on his work:

"Each speed poetry session, I might hear between three and twenty new poems read out to me by their authors. Each one gave me hints on different ways of approaching the same subject matter or interpreting the same phrase – oh yes, I'd think, a poem can sound like found dialogue, or it can be like a little third-person short story with line breaks, or it can have a chorus like a song, or repeated lines, or take all its similes from a particular lexical field, or be presented as instructions, or just be a list of stuff, or be an open letter to somebody, or be in praise of something, or adopt the style of another type of text like a newspaper report. Slowly, I was building up a repetoire of options for when I got the next title… Doing speed poetry regularly helps abolish a fear of blank pages. You learn to just roll your fucking sleeves up and have a bash."

The attempt starts today at 9:00 GMT and there's a blog set up for the poems. Tim is planning about eight minutes a poem, and will be posting the titles on twitter as he starts each one so people can play along. I'm sorry that I'll be at work most of the day and unable to watch until the evening.