Category: Writing

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.

Last night was the second Write Club, run by Ellen de Vries and myself. Write Club is a flash fiction writing event (no, definitely not a workshop) which sprang from Brighton's Write Club networking group. The night has the following rules:

• The night is divided into rounds. Each round has a prompt image and a time limit of 15, 10, 5 or 2 minutes.
• Everyone writes a story or poem 'inspired' by the image
• Everyone then takes a turn reading what they've written, whether they're happy with it or not.
• There is no formal critique of the pieces.
• Nobody is allowed to apologise or pre-empt their work – what you've stands or fall on its own merits.

(We work very hard at not making Fight Club references, as shown by my restraint in the list above. But last night did feel a little reminiscent of the movie, with 18 of us in the basement of the Skiff after hours. Word of mouth had brought in more people than last time, some of whom I didn't know personally. For what it's worth, I see Ellen as the Tyler Durden figure).

I felt more nervous this time because of the larger group. I wanted everyone to leave feeling they'd had a worthwhile evening. And it was, of course, guaranteed that I'd have a projector glitch half-way through the night. Even so, I think people enjoyed the evening and the approach we've taken.

I don't know if it was my nerves, but I was less happy in general with the work I produced this time. I found it harder to come up with ideas, facing a blank sheet three minutes through one of the five-minute rounds. Even though Ellen and I choose the pictures, we don't manage to prepare ideas in advance and the prompts end up being as hard for us as everyone else.

Despite feeling less sure about my work, there were two pieces from last night that I'd like to do more with which, I guess, is good going (and better than last time). But the main thing was that I had a fun evening. I heard some amusing, interesting and thought-provoking stories, some of which seemed well-formed despite the short time available.

Ellen and I are still tinkering with the format. Some ideas and prompts have worked well in the last two sessions, other things not so well, but I'm very excited about the third Write Club session, which will be coming soon…

If you want to play along at home, the pictures we chose (CC-licensed photos from flickr tagged with Brighton) were:

1. Ghosts on the shore (10 minute round)
2. chickens (5 minute round)
3. Pac-Man Drinking (2 minute round)
4. Fish and chips (15 minute round)
5. movie still #6 (5 minute round)
6. The Head (2 minute round)

Thanks to everyone who came, and thank you to the Skiff for providing a fantastic venue

Sunday travel on East-Midlands trains is a trial, with the journey to St Pancras taking twice as long as during the week. The one advantage of this is that it provides some quiet time for reading. The weekend before last I received my copy of Vanessa Gebbie's new book, Short Circuit, a collection of essays on writing short stories. I read the book over the weekend and finished it on my epic crawl to London.

Short Circuit is a very good book. It was refreshingly free of mysticism, offering practical advice and techniques. Being a collection there are many different voices, some even contradicting one another as Vanessa has pointed out. Not every piece in the book spoke to me, but I don't think it should have done – I imagine every writer could find something useful in this collection. Some of the things I found most interesting are below:

• My favourite piece was by David Gaffney. Gaffney has written two collections of microfiction, Sawn-off Tales and Aromabingo. Microfictions fascinate me, and I've found homes for a few sub-100 word stories. Not all of my pieces have worked, and Gaffney offers some interesting advice on structuring tiny stories. Most useful was his suggestion to put a microfiction's ending in the middle to avoid the punch-line effect. Great advice, and something I can use in my own work.
• Alex Keegan's piece, '24: The importance of theme' was very interesting, starting with a discussion of theme, then discussing how theme can be explored through the use of character. It's a compelling argument, and gave me some ideas for fixing a few stagnant stories.
• Elaine Chew talks about the epiphany ending for short stories, "sudden or dawning change upon or realizations of inner truth for a protagonist based on the events of the story" Chew questions how realistic an approach this is, how such stories often rely on time stopping as the character is changed. With such an ending the reader does not see any resulting change in the character's actions. Using a story by Lorrie Moore as a model, Chew suggests a series of epiphanic footprints are more realistic, "the dribble-down effect of a life-changing realization."
• Paul Magrs essay was fun, a quirky list of thoughts on creative writing, written at the end of a term teaching workshops
• The most fascinating piece was Sarah Salway's discussion, 'Stealing Stories', particularly in light of the scandals this summer. Salway focusses on stories heard from family and friends, or found in newspapers. In her introduction, however, she quotes TS Eliot's line that "Mediocre writers borrow, great artists steal", comparing such theft to stealing a car: if the car is stripped down or resprayed, it will be unrecognisable to the original owners. Which seems to support the view that theft, particularly of virtual goods, doesn't count if no-one notices that a crime has been committed. It's a fascinating and provocative essay, which amusingly practises what it preaches.

Short Circuit is a fun book. It's certainly given me more techniques to work with than most writing manuals I've read. Well worth the time.