Category: Writing

(This is another of the Literature Network posts. It was written a few years back and introduced the idea of 1000 True Fans. That idea still seems as distant as ever – the Internet is a good place to access culture but doesn't offer easy ways to discover it. I still like the JK Rowling joke though)

How many true fans does a writer need? There’s a lot to be said for being famous for 15 people.

Every creative writing course hints: it could be you. They promise access to agents and the chance to break into the world of publishing. After years of perseverance, of writing in coffee shops and cold flats, your novel might be published and become huge. You too could be as big as JK Rowling.

The problem with this is that a lot of people put a lot of effort into making JK Rowling as successful as she is. Booksellers, marketers, merchandisers, film-makers, all labour in support of her books, to say nothing of the readers working their way through them. Even the people who don’t read her books put a lot of effort into saying they have no time to read stories about boy wizards.

Imagine what the world would be like if there were dozens of writers as successful as JK Rowling. The economy would have to be structured around them, and people would spend all their leisure time reading. The world only has room for one JK Rowling, and she’s already doing a good job of it.

There are thousands of people studying creative writing and none of them are going to be as big as JK Rowling. Few of them will even be as big as Ann Quin or BS Johnson. So a more interesting question is the smallest number of readers a writer needs.

Kevin Kelly, editor of wired magazine, gave an interesting economic answer. He suggested that artists could build a successful career with “1000 true fans“, willing to buy anything they produced. So, assuming an average UK wage of around £24,000, Kelly would suggest an artist could make a living from 2000 people paying them £12 a year, after costs.

It’s a provocative idea, but there are problems. Kelly wrote a follow-up article where he admitted there were few real-world examples of such artists, and that the demands of maintaining true fans was too onerous for many. Science-fiction author John Scalzi has also responded, outlining a number of other issues. Finding a 1,000 true fans is more difficult than it sounds – how many artists are you that committed to?

There’s something to be said for people with far less than 1,000 true fans. In 1991, the artist Momus wrote a famous essay, Pop Stars? Nein Danke riffing on Andy Warhol’s famous statement, in which Momus claimed that in the future “everyone will be famous for fifteen people“. Momus looked forward to a world where, instead of stars on the scale of Elvis or Madonna, there were tens of thousands of smaller stars, “a state of fabulous confusion, exploding into fragments“.

In Momus’s world, aided by technology, you could find the artist that’s just right for you, someone that moves you and fourteen other people, while leaving most other people cold. Such artists would have a small but dedicated audience. When journalist and activist Danny O’Brien asked ‘how many people do you need to be famous for?’, he suggested that if “One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic, that’s enough to keep you in beers all year.”

The Internet allows microcelebrities. Rather than reading one-size-fits-all star writers, we could pick the writer that’s perfect for us, someone who shares the exact same strange obsessions as we do. Whether this works with novels, which require a huge commitment to read, let alone write, is questionable. But I bet it would work with short stories and poetry. Somewhere in the world there are probably dozens of writers who would move me as much as my favourite novelists. The trick is to find them.

And 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.

(This is another literature network post that has been offline since the site disappeared. It's my favourite of the pieces and received some very mixed responses, which I quite liked. Some people thought I was joking, others thought I was serious. I'm still not certain either way)

More non-fiction books are sold about writing than any other subject, except for cooking and relationships. Most of these guides say the same thing – page after page of level-headed advice like ‘show don’t tell’, ‘write what you know’ and ‘find your voice’. They’re all encouraging, suggesting you can’t make yourself a literary genius but anyone can become a decent writer.

No how-to-write book would ever claim that you’ve got it or you haven’t. People are more interested in supportive encouragement. The appetite for guides like The Artist’s Way is massive. You see the same thing on the web, with thousands upon thousands of pages listing numbered tips on how to write. Follow all these guides and anyone can become a competent writer.

But I’m bored. I’m tired of stories with perfect point-of-view, clever use of theme and anorexic pared-down prose. I crave more. I want people to strive for greatness, even if ninety-nine-in-a-hundred fail. I want to read great books, not good ones, and there aren’t enough great books.

Nobody has written the how-to-write guide I want to see (although one friend used Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw as a template, with disastrous but compelling results). Life is too short for me to write my ideal writing guide, but here are the top seven tips I’d like aspiring writers to follow.

1. Don’t write every day – write when inspired: there’s a macho cult about writing every day, grinding out work whether you want to or not. Instead you should only write when inspired. If you’re not inspired, don’t chain yourself to a keyboard: get into the world and get inspired.
2. Read narrowly: most how-to books say writers should be voracious readers. It’s far better to read carefully. Get under the skin of great books. Hunter S. Thompson retyped A Farewell to Arms to learn how it worked. You’re better off reading a few books well than piling through thousands of books that have nothing to say to you.
3. Write what you know: Imagination is a wonderful thing, but admit it – you too get a frisson from someone like Hemingway, Conrad or Burroughs, who lived one step away from what they were writing. However, writing what you know is boring if you work in an office, so make sure you’re living a life worth writing about. Your literary biographers will thank you.
4. Shun writing workshops. Writing workshops are about consensus, about removing the difficult bits from potential works of genius. Imagine William S. Burroughs submitting to years of workshops and removing the strangeness and obscenity from Naked Lunch. Another reason to avoid workshops is that other writers will be less impressed by your creativity than civilians. It’s more fun to stand out from the crowd rather than hide in the midst of one.
5. Quit your job: Most writing books warn against quitting your job. Dream all you like, they say, but writing won’t make you rich. Your aspirations for greatness should override such petty caution. You may end up in poverty, but you’re not going to make a work of genius wasting your days in an office.
6. Drink. Alcohol is a killer and nobody wants to end their days like Hancock in Sydney. But think of all the exciting writers who liked a tipple (Fleming, Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway). There are probably lots of writers who don’t drink, but the fact I can’t name any shows you how unexciting sobriety is. As a bonus, if you’re having trouble with tip 5 then week-night drinking will help you leave your job.
7. Be extreme. I don’t suggest being precious about your writing (as Chesterton said, “the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs”) but you must slip loose the chains of modern life. Eccentricity and genius may be two different things, but non-geniuses can fool some people with cultivated eccentricity. Adopt peculiar restrictions on clothes or food; develop obscure phobias or hatreds, whatever it takes to make yourself memorable. People love to retell stories about Burroughs and the Beats – and Chesterton certainly wasn’t above courting attention.

These tips aren’t an easy way out. Following them will likely lead to years of poverty and hangovers. But greatness has its price, and you owe it to the world.

Last week I wrote about my stockpile of stories and how it was time I did something with them. So I've printed out some copies of one of them, Tales of the Occupation. If you'd like me to post you one, leave your address in a comment (don't worry, I won't publish it). I bought some stamps the other day, and will send copies until the stamps run out.

Tales of the Occupation is a short story (~1000 words) written around 2007. I think only one person has read this so far. I wouldn't claim it's a life-changing story, but it's the sort of thing I'd like to read, blending Brighton with a Lord Dunsany-style vision of the Arabian Nights. It also has a political inspiration, but that should probably be left to speak for itself. The quote at the start is taken from Dunsany's A Tale of London. Dunsany at his best is an incredible short story writer and unjustly overlooked nowadays.

I've wanted to experiment with sending out stories by post before but never got beyond the idea or the initial announcement. This time I have the stamps and envelopes and print-outs all ready to go, so it will definitely happen. 

1. This is a post about blogging, and how the software I use affects what I write. It follows on a little from Saturday's post.
2. I’ve been blogging since about 2000, when I used Blogger, FTP and a demon.net account. The idea of a weblog, a CMS that almost anyone could use, was powerful and allowed a lot of people to set up websites. Early weblogs were a little bit cobbled together, with comments hosted on separate services, but there was an active community with people communicating back and forth. It was fun.
3. Nowadays I use a Typepad hosted site. Considering Typepad is a paid service it’s not very good (stats and spam detection are particularly poor). It works just well enough that I haven't got around to setting up a server to host my own blog.
4. What I like about blogging is that the space here is mine – people choose to visit, some by google but most directly. They know what to expect and don't seem unhappy with what they find. 
5. I’m still not sure what blogging is for. I enjoy writing the posts and have had some interesting responses. I miss the community aspects of weblogs, which have moved on to twitter and facebook. This means the conversation has become transient and isn't attached to the posts they reference.
6. I’m not sure I like the blog post as a format since there is something intimidating about it. One has to start with a title and produce a complete, well-formed thought. The resulting writing is given its own webpage and permalink. Each post has a date and a calendar groups the content, exposing periods where a blog-owner hasn't posted. The whole idea of pages is a strange one in itself, a physical limitation translated to the Internet.
7. Via Russell Davies I found a post called Thinking out loud in paragraphs which starts "Is there lurking somewhere a New Blogging, some set of new or old-made-new formats that might light up our feed readers again?"
8. The writer goes on to say “And I don’t know about you, but I have a sense for the amount of writing that can be done in a single go—a single flurry of the keys. An idea strikes, or a memory; you bang it out and post it. There’s such pleasure in that.” That sort of writing, capturing an idea and setting it down, is what I aspire to produce online. But writing weblog posts seems so weighty and formal. I can’t rant about a book for a bit, or simply say what is provoking me. The only place where I produce that sort of loose thought it on twitter. 
9. I’m certainly not the only person frustrated by the weblog format. This is something Tom wrote about recently: "When I first started blogging, I used a quite esoteric product called Radio Userland… I found myself jotting down lots of short-form thoughts. My style of writing was very different to the longer pieces I do nowadays, and in part I put this down to the lurking "Title" field that TypePad includes: it suggests a formality to individual posts. But I quite miss being able to throw out any old idea. The conciseness of Twitter makes it great fun, but it's an awkward place to carry out conversations and sometimes I want a little more than 140 characters…"
10. The tools I use are certainly problematic. I’m writing this in a word processor because I want to use numbered paragraphs and a word processor feels most natural for that. The Typepad editor is horrible, slow and clunky, with a somewhat whimsical approach to paragraphing. Most times I write my posts as HTML in a plain text editor then copy them to Typepad for a final polish.
11. I’m also not as fluid a blogger as I would like. It takes me considerable time to edit my posts and remove silly errors. Sometimes I read back my posts and don’t sound as assured and confident as I would like. I have posts languishing in my drafts folder that have been there for months, some half-complete, others never posted. Would I find blogging easier if I didn't have a drafts folder, if I had to commit to an idea once I started it? I don't know yet if this post will be published or if it will end up in the drafts folder before being deleted.
12. I find Twitter much easier than blogging since everything is potentially throwaway but, if I want, I can develop an idea further.
13. Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr have changed the way in which people read the Internet. From Matt Locke's post  Getting Attention: "Most people using the web, especially in younger age-groups, now experience the web as streams, not sites. It might be the stream of updates in Facebook, or their contact’s Flickr photostream, or a string of results on Google, or in an RSS reader…" 
14. One is not supposed to read everything on Twitter and Facebook. You accept the risk of ‘missing’ things. Content is there in-the-moment and can be difficult to find again. It has changed the way we read things online: How do we comment and share? How do we save things for posterity, so we can find them again? There is something disturbing about streams too, the constant flow of information, all somehow reduced to the same level of importance, each message ready to be replaced by something else. 
15. The lack of memory is a major problem with streams. Twitter currently offers no access to the users' old tweets. As Matt Ogle wrote in his post Archive Fever: A Love Letter to the real-time web: "The problem is ultimately one of attitude. The current philosophy underlying most of the real-time web is that if it’s not recent, it’s not important."
16. If I had time, I would restart this weblog as a wiki, where a page can be a stub, a single thought. The discussions pages would allow feedback in place of comments. There would be no final version of any content, everything reduced to a work-in-progress that might be finished but doesn't need to be, the full history available to people who want it. Linking between the pages would be more associative. 
17. This still wouldn't solve the problems of participation, of capturing the comments on Twitter and Facebook, but I think the writing I would produce would be more satisfying for me.

Writing is hard.

No, writing is easy. As I've said before, one of the great things about Not for the Faint-Hearted is turning out interesting and entertaining pieces of writing in three minutes. One of my NFTFH pieces, with very little editing, has been published as part of the Quick Fictions iPhone app, produced by Myriad Editions. Writing is easy (particularly when you compare it to arts like aerial acrobatics and boxing). I enjoy writing and it's certainly no worse a way to spend my spare time than running, reading or watching TV. My problem is what to do with the results. I've accumulated a lot of text, a word horde of interesting odd stories. And it's still growing.

My problem with sharing work comes down to whether I have the right. Everyone has so many demands on their time, particularly when there's a whole Internet to read. The writer Paul Ford gave an amazing speech, 10 timeframes, the start of which has stuck in my head:

There are 200 of you in this auditorium. So every minute I don’t talk saves about three-and-a-third hours of human time. That’s a pretty serious ratio. Every one of my minutes is collectively 200 of yours.

If I give someone something to read, I take up their time. I'm suggesting that this writing is more important than anything else they can do with 5 minutes or 5 hours of their time. It seems almost impolite to create these obligations for other people have when I work so hard to avoid distractions in my own life – do unto others, and all that.

Another question I have is whether sharing writing is just arrogant, attention-seeking behaviour. I've seen too many appalling poets at open mics who act as if they're doing the audience a favour by sharing the results of their creativity. Nobody wants to be the person who won't shut up and let everyone go to the bar.

So my work builds up. Clown Stories Volume 1 has been ready to print for a year. I have a few finished novels, all of which I like a lot, and only a few people have read them. I've never thrown the switch on Postal Press, or launched the Ghost Blog, even though these projects are ready to go. Nobody has seen my illustrated Fairyland booklet.

(At the start of my Creative and Critical Writing MA, I attended an amazing course by Dr. Amber Jacobs called 'On (Not) Being Able to Write' (the title was a reference to a book by Marion Milner). The seminars related the pathologies of writing to theories of British Psychoanalysis. As I remember it, Dr. Jacobs frequently compared writing to toilet training and this memorable imagery seems to fit with this current state of backlog)

One of the big issues most creative writing courses ignore is that of audience. Great Britain is turning out thousands of academically trained creative writers without considering what to do with all the work that is generated. Should I delete this writing? Put it online somewhere? Bury it like radioactive waste? Maybe the advantage of writing groups and creative writing is to provide an audience.

I’m a writer who hates sharing their work. I may not even share this.

(In 2009 I wrote some posts for literaturenetwork.org. The site in question is no longer available so I'm posting the pieces I have copies of to my weblog)

Creative Writing is a big business. A few years ago the BBC claimed there were more than 600 full time creative writing degree courses at British universities. These included options such as Accountancy with Creative Writing (currently available at the University of Derby).  Hundreds of less-formal courses are available, as well as shorter seminars and residential breaks. Requiring little more than desk space and a tutor, such courses are easy to put on and profitable.

These courses need to distinguish themselves in a crowded market and one way they do this is to offer access to agents. The courses are underwritten with the promise, not that you will be trained to be a better writer, but that you will gain access to the literary world, and through that achieve the dream: giving up the day job to become a writer. Inevitably, as Hanif Kureshi pointed out at a recent appearance, false expectations are created. Few courses mention how far the reality of writing is from the dream:

• In 2001 the Society of Authors claimed that three-quarters of writers made less than £20,000 a year.
• A 2006 Independent article asserts that “the average author earns less than £7,000 a year.” Anthony Beevor describes one writer whose books were so heavily discounted that he sold 40,000 copies yet, financially, “he would be better off working the till in Sainsbury’s”.
• In 2007 the Independent reported statistics from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society that “£907.5m is earned by the 55,000 authors in Britain every year but 50 per cent of the cash goes to 10 per cent of the authors, meaning that the 5,500 bestselling writers share at least £453.75m of it, giving them an average annual income of £82,500 while the other 49,500 authors share the rest, typically earning £4,000“
• The same article includes a heartbreaking case study of a writer with a significant audience who is suffering financially. She concludes: “the best advice if you want to eat is: ‘Do something else.’"
• Even those stories of huge advances can’t be trusted. The rumoured £1,000,000 advance given to Magnus Mills was, in reality, closer to £10,000.

Making a living from creative writing is difficult. As Lydia Towsey pointed out in a recent Literature Network post, “‘a working poet’ now means to diversify… workshops, producing, directing, mentoring and other types of writing are all vital for the buying of bread.”

So what about those creative writing courses that promise a route to literary success? Participants expecting to make a living from creative writing are most likely to achieve this by teaching. From this angle the creative writing industry looks like a pyramid scheme. At its worst I’ve seen people whose only credit was an MA from a good course going on to teach their own informal courses. Considering the economics involved, one wonders whether courses would be better off spending less time teaching structure and form and more on teaching how to promote and facilitate a creative writing course.

Of course I’m teasing – mostly. I’ve attended some courses myself and had a great time, making some wonderful (and some lousy) friendships. The creative writing courses have led me to performing my work in public and have undoubtedly enriched my life.

There’s a serious point here though, and that is that creative writing courses need to focus on the benefits they can guarantee to give students – ‘life skills’, for want of a better term. Through creative writing courses I’ve come to read my work in public, making me more confident in my day job and social life. An awareness of writing allows me to produce all sort of copy, and edit other people’s work. Furthermore, studying any subject in a serious manner hones a range of useful skills.

Like a lot of people who’ve taken creative writing courses I’ve written my own novel and I certainly want to see that published. But if it isn’t, and I’m still doing my day job in ten years time, I won’t feel like I’ve wasted my time with ‘creative writing’. What concerns me is that too many people start courses with the expectation of certain results, and leave with those notions intact, always disappointed with their lot.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

(It's interesting to look back on this article. Since this was published, I set up the Brighton Creative Writing Sessions with Ellen de Vries, experimenting with creative writing workshops that were self-contained and entertaining, focussing on writing rather than publication. I was always uneasy that we charged for these (although we intentionally made no profit after expenses). My main involvement with 'creative writing' nowadays is through Not for the Faint-Hearted, which is a good example of the sort of thing I was arguing for here).

After a long break, Not for the Faint-Hearted recently resumed its regular monthly slot. Last week was the second 2012 session and about 18 people came along.

The Not for the Faint-Hearted (NFTFH) sessions are based around a series of visual 'creative writing' prompts projected on a screen. Everyone writes for three minutes in response - a story, poem, dialogue, limerick, or simply a description of what they see. Then everyone takes a turn to read something or all of what they've written. There is only one rule: you are not allowed to apologise for what you read. While some people recoil in horror at the idea of NFTFH, everyone who comes seems to enjoy it.

I started the group in October 2009 with Ellen de Vries. NFTFH was originally intended as an experiment in creativity. We wanted to see what happened when people took risks and presented unfinished work. We were surprised by how good the work we heard was.

For some reason, the stories people wrote in three minutes were better than many of the pieces I've heard at open mike nights. Three minutes gives people just enough time to come up with an idea and produce something simple around it. We don't do rounds longer than three minutes because the work that results is less interesting.  

The attendees all seem to enjoy themselves and have a variety of reasons for coming. The thing that keeps me running the sessions is that I love the stories produced. In last week's session I heard almost 150 pieces. Some of them made everyone laugh out loud; all contained some interesting element. And when a story doesn't work, there's another one along moments later.

I don't know what to do with all the stories I've written at the sessions – possibly a couple of hundred.  Some are too closely tied to the image to be interesting, but one has found a home on Myriad's Quick Fictions app. I might post some here, or bundle the best ones into a Kindle file, but that isn't likely to happen any time soon.

One of the most important things about Not for the Faint-Hearted is the Skiff. Without their support, it wouldn't be possible to run the night and I'm very grateful to them for that.  

Spacedog are one of my favourite bands. They seem as if they'd be easy to describe, but obvious words like ambient, haunting, or ethereal don't do them justice. There's a lot of humour in their live shows, robotics and a weird touch of folk music. And there's also Hugo.

Back in May I saw Spacedog's Televisor show at the Brighton Fringe (video here). In the interval I scribbled a short story inspired by one of their songs, Laika. I tidied it up a week or two later and gave Sarah a copy. She's now put it on her website and you can read it there.

Sarah's site also includes a great pair of essays on Twitter, one against and one (guardedly) in favour. They give an interesting account of what twitter is and isn't, as well as describing one person learning how they prefer to use the medium.

Last night, Mr. Parkinson came round to visit:

We drank beer, ate curry and worked on the layout for Clown Stories Volume 1. There's still a little more work to do, but I'm hoping to finish that later this month. A few last minute bits of proofing, and a general polishing of the design and it will be ready:

 
The cover is by the illustrator Kate Shields. The book contains three stories by Chris and the rest are mine. They're not the worst of my clown stories – only two people have read those, and I'm not really in touch with them any more. They're not the worst of my clown stories, but some of them are not very nice.