Can you teach genius?

I wandered in on the end of a radio four discussion on the niggly 'you and yours' program, which is known by many names in our house, namely 'you and bloody yours,' or 'tough tits, you bought it.'
The moan today, which was definitely in the 'you're a big boy now so it's up to you' category, was the launch of a novel writing course/school run by/connected to Faber and Faber, the detail of which I am hazy about as I only came in on the end. The premise of the pedantic witterings of the program seemed to be that you can't teach people how to write a good novel, so offering courses one has to pay for is a waste of time/money and a false promise, as you can take the course and still be unable to write a novel.
Leaving aside the issue that presumably we are all grown ups, and if we want to spend our money on a course it's up to us - after all, how many people take a water colour course just because they like it without any hope of winning the Turner prize - out came again the off repeated mantra that you can't teach writing, you can either do it or not.

Tosh.

As the poor man from Faber and Faber said, who must have felt rather grim sitting in the chair usually reserved for cowboy builders and fraudulent share dealers, why is it that we're quite happy to accept the teaching of music but not the teaching of writing? In my mind it's linked to the myth that writers don't plan, and some how the best writers just sit there and let the muse flow through them without knowing where the story will take them - which is rubbish.
First of all, yes, you can learn how to improve your writing, and you should. If you think you don't need to learn technique, you are arrogant and you'll learn the hard way that these things won't hold back your creativity but give you the tools to properly express yourself. Master the basics, then you can let rip without the obvious tripping you up.

 Second of all, no one writes anything worthwhile in a vacuum, and a creative writing course is a great way to meet people who will give you feedback on your work without an agenda. You'll also learn more from them than they know they are teaching you, if you've any sense.

 And finally, no, you can't teach genius, but you sure as hell can teach how to write a better book, and not every book that sells is a work of genius. Some of them are just a damn good read, and there will always be people who want a damn good read, and to write a damn good read you need to be damn good.

Our culture seems to celebrate the over night success, as if that by it's self is a mark of quality. Let's not, let's celebrate the long hard slog of it, because actually, nothing in life worthwhile is easy and nothing in life achieved without hard work, and frankly, that's good.
As for courses, look around, ask around and find one you like the sound of and put the work in. If you've not got the money, find some on-line groups and put the work in there, the key to it all is to work.

Research is not a four letter word.

Apparently Ian Banks hates research. I quite like it, as it happens. It's when you have that germ of an idea and the story is all wonderfully fluid and full of potential, and almost as if you are a fisherman tickling your trout, you can ease up to it and play in the shallows without frightening it away, lulling your narrative into a false sense of security.

Without boundaries it could go anywhere, people you have yet to meet but will one day know as well as your friends are still nothing more than abstract swirls of metaphor and device.
The odd thing is, or maybe it's not odd at all, but this thing is sometimes scenes come through to me so sharp and clear that I can see, taste and feel them before the research bit. These are both appealing and dangerous - the more I see them, the stronger the desire to find out more, but the danger is that I become too hung up on retro fitting the research to the ideas at the risk of creating a false picture.
But let's not get too hung up on this yet, let's just collect the scenes  - the terrible date with the Dentist from Munich with 'eyes like grey marbles rolling round a cream-wear plate', and the first meeting with Jenny ' so feline one had the impulse to scratch her behind her ear, so beautifully deformed that even her missing hand made one feel burdened to have been born with two' - and see what back ground the research paints for those thoughts.
And now a plea, if anyone had history book about with Weimar republic, then I would be most grateful for the loan of them, and will treat all with the utmost respect.

The joke, part two.

 

In this article, and I still prefer the word article to the word blog, I’m using the joke to expand on one of the most important tools available to a writer when creating character, show, don’t tell. It’s an oft-quoted phrase in creative writing, but it can be a slippery concept to nail down, so I hope this article will help.

Here’s the joke we’re working on, incase you haven’t read the other article.

A man goes up to the doorman of a nightclub.

‘You can’t come in,’ the doorman says, ‘you’re not wearing a tie.’ The man goes back to his car and searches around for something he can use. All he finds is a pair of jump leads. In desperation he ties them around his shirt’s collar in place of a tie. When he goes back to the nightclub, the doorman eyes him suspiciously.

‘Alright,’ he says, after a while. ‘You can go in – just don’t start anything!’

A joke is the ultimate paired down narrative, but it’s amazing what the reader’s imagination will do with very little. And that’s what you want to happen, because the more your make their minds work, the more they’ve engaged with your narrative. It seems counter intuitive, but often the less you explain, the more the reader will know.

In our joke, we have the simplest of openers, a man walks up to a doorman; but this shows us a whole street scene, which in a novel we are at liberty to paint, but is still here never the less in the joke. Yes, one wants a novel to be deeper and more complex than a joke, but as an exercise, it should be possible to cut every chapter down to a few, key sentences that are doing the work most critical to your story. If you can’t reduce your chapter down to this level, it might mean that your chapter lacks focus, that you’re too much padding, or that you’re over complicating things, which can cause your narrative to lose the plot, so to speak.

Most characters have a public persona and a private one, and the joy of any narrative is how those two are revealed to us, and how they relate to each other. Not many memorable characters are exactly how they appear to be; the aloof woman is actually a passionate lover, the charming man is actually an evil psychopath and the boring accounts clerk has the heart of the hero beating under his polyester suit.

In the joke, we’ve got the man and the doorman. Doorman carries a certain loading with it – it’s unlikely that he’s is five foot one and skinny, so we see him as imposing, possibly aggressive, maybe even a bit thick and possibly with a few convictions to boot. We might also see him as a ‘job’s worth’, someone uncaring and officious. This is his public face, the first impression we have of him, the fun comes when we play with the reader’s expectations.

The man, the hero at the start of the piece, doesn’t have a tie, but he still wants to get into the club. This shows us that he’s out of his comfort zone, he’s not a regular patron, but something is driving him to try and get in there. He’s a man on a mission, and even if the mission is one we wouldn’t be interested in, a mission makes him more interesting and engaging that a couch potato who’s doing nothing. We feel he’s the sort of person not willing to give up in the face of a seemingly implacable obstacle; he’s drawing on his inner reserves to fight for what he wants.

We’re not told the quest is important to gim, but shown it when he returns to his car to search for something he can use as a tie. Had he been simply trying his luck on a drunken night out and not really that bothered about the club, he could have just wandered off again, but instead he tries to think around the problem. He’s probably not an intellectual in the traditional sense, because there’s something desperate in his search, something directionless, but he is making the effort.

He’s also a bit of a chancer – because who else would think that a set of jump leads would pass as a tie? But the tension is mounting; time is passing, so he hits on a solution however bizarre. If he were a logical person, he might have gone up to a stranger and offered him money for his tie, or found a 24 hour super market; if he were a violent person he might have punched the doorman or robbed someone for a tie – but his choice is not to be a criminal, or a quitter but to try his luck. This makes me at least see him as a loveable looser, not a villain, maybe a bit of a rogue, perhaps even a romantic, hoping for luck to smile on him for once? He’s a glass half full kind of a guy against all the odds.

By the way, you’re welcome to argue here that the jump leads are merely there to set up the punch line, as if he’d found a string of sausages the joke wouldn’t work, but the principal stands firm – he decides to give it a go against all the odds. Besides, plot and character are inextricably linked in any narrative – this is writing, and we read for more than just facts, but for entertainment.

Now, back to the doorman. The joke has shown him as the implacable face of authority, then he’s confronted again by the man with the jump leads round his neck. If he were simply a one-dimensional thug, he could have told him to shove off. He could have even taken offence and accused the man of mocking him – it is quite an inflammatory thing to do in a way, lampooning the whole tie rule – but no. He knows he’s had the ‘micky’ taken out of him, but he appreciates the joke, and it allows him a killer punch line, so he’s not going to follow orders when fate hands him a chance to be funny. He’s a bit of a rebel on the side – by the end there’s certainly a warm heart beating under that hard exterior, not to mention a love of word play.

Perhaps also at the end there’s a sense of sadness here – because if the man goes into the club with a set of jump leads round his neck, no one else will get the joke, or accept them as a tie. Perhaps he’ll end up looking like a fool anyway, because he clearly doesn’t fit in, and his desperate antics will come to nothing, when he discovers that getting through the door is the least of his worries. How often have we been there, to struggle for something only to be disappointed when we get it? The man is likable but flawed, and how real is that?

Reading back over what I’ve written, it might be argued that none of this is in the joke at all, I’m just using my imagination to draw these conclusions – but that’s exactly what I’m trying to show you, this is what our brains do. It’s the same mechanism that makes us see faces in floral wallpaper and on buildings, and the clever writer knows this and uses it.

Even with this paired down joke, I’ve already created a sense of character for myself, I’ve invested in them, and now I’ve invested in the narrative. If this was not a joke, but the set up for a story, chapter one, I’d already be wondering what it is about the nightclub that make the man so desperate to get in, and anxious to see if the author will dash his hopes, or if he’ll ultimately win. I’ve got a sense of who he is, and I’m on his side, and I’d even like to find out a little more about the bouncer. To ‘tell’ the reader that this is what the characters are like, you’d have to write the joke much more like this:

There is a man, he’s a little bit of a looser but he’s ok really, and he’s sometimes a bit of a lateral thinker, but under pressure he can make some odd decisions that sometimes work out, though perhaps not as he intended. He wants to get into night club for some reason, but the bouncer on the door is really stern, he’s not going to let anyone in because he’s trained for years to be a bouncer; besides, he did time when he was younger and this is the sort of job he can do with a record, but he’s a good sort really, he’s not a bad man but he looks bad…

Now I’m wadding through the back-story of the characters and I’ve lost the plot. All of that detail can come later when you’ve established your narrative – and if you use your characters actions to show their inner world, much of their back story will be already be there in the mind of the reader, so when they come to read it later, it feels authentic, because it’s not coming out of the blue, but out of the seed you’ve already planted in their minds. They will think ‘Yes, the man would do that, because that’s how he reacted when he tried to get into the Night Club; he tried to solve the problem but in a way that smacked more desperation than intelligence’ and that makes him seem real. And when he learns to think first and not panic, or not want to get into the nightclub that shows us he’s grown as a person by the end of the narrative. If he does, of course.

As a writer, you need to know every detail about your characters, but to make those details come alive for your reader, show your characters in action and know how they would react in any given situation. Then, they can get under the skin of your reader in the most effective way, almost without the reader noticing.

 

My 'how to write' series, from the lofty position of the self taught.

 

In this series of articles, I’m going to use a joke to illustrate on some of the oft-talked about principals of creative writing.

Jokes are a story in microcosm, but still contain all the elements needed in a narrative to make it work. Jokes – the conflict, the struggle and the pay off – a beginning, middle and end, stripped down to their most essential form. If you can pull off a good joke, you can pull off a good story. So, here’s the joke, and forgive me if you’ve heard it before -

A man goes up to the doorman of a nightclub.

‘You can’t come in,’ the doorman says, ‘you’re not wearing a tie.’ The man goes back to his car and searches around for something he can use. All he finds is a pair of jump leads, so, in desperation, he ties them around his shirt’s collar in place of a tie. When he goes back to the nightclub, the doorman eyes him suspiciously.

‘Alright,’ he says, after a while. ‘You can go in – just don’t start anything!’

Boom, boom! Now, let’s isolate the elements of this joke that illustrate the key aspects to consider when writing any piece of fiction, no matter the length.

1) The conflict – You need to establish your world, who’s in it and what’s at stake as soon as possible to create the conflict. Here we have the man, the doorman and a nightclub. These are very simple terms, but each conveys something to create the conflict.

The Nightclub tells us the time of day, and the relationship between your characters. You have the doorman, whose very name indicates he is an authority figure, a literal gatekeeper, who is keeping our hero, the man, from his goal. We never know the name of the man or anything about him, but we can still relate to him because we can see he’s denied access to something he desires by an authority figure, so we’re on his side. Even better, because the wearing of a tie is an affectation, which in itself is meaningless - a tie is a symbol of status but serves no practical purpose as something like a hard hat might when entering a building site, we feel his situation is unjust. This makes him an ‘everyman’ who we can feel sympathy for, because we’ve probably all been denied something we want by an authority figure in the past. We have a conflict, and have picked a side.

2) The struggle – the hero tries to overcome. We can tell that he’s desperate to enter the club, because he's desperate to find a tie. He searches his car for anything he can use, and this at once marks him out as a man willing to problem solve, to give 'it' a go - and also increases the conflict – because effort indicates that to him, the goal of the nightclub is worth the struggle. He might be tilting a windmills, the struggle might not be one we would bother with, but the act of his struggle is engaging.

Then, he finds the jump leads, and sees a way forward, a way that another person might not have seen. This is key because now there is a hope. It’s a desperate hope, because who would really accept a pair of jump leads as a tie? So we have tension, will the struggle work, will his lateral thinking save the day after all? Doubt in the mind of the reader means they are engaging with the struggle, you are creating that ‘edge of the seat’ sensation, and it means that they care about your character and his fate.

            3) The pay off – All the best stories play with the expectations of the reader in some way. If the bouncer just waves the man through or sends him packing because he's not wearing a tie but had jump leads round his neck, where’s the joke? What makes this joke funny, if it can still be funny after we’ve analyzed it to death, is that the doorman subverts expectation by coming onside with the hero, in fact, he could almost be said to take control of the story with his witty quip – at the last moment bringing a great deal of colour and personality to his role, and it leaves the reader surprised and, we hope, delighted by the unexpected nature of the outcome.

Ease right? Well no, not at all, that it why a good joke is hard to find and a good story equally so, but I hope that by this, simple example, you have an idea what the three stages of story demands of the writer – conflict – struggle – pay off/twist.

In my next article, I shall look at the same joke and use it to show how actions speak louder than words when creating character.

Authenticity is a slippery eel....

I am currently working at fever pitch on the novel for which I have a full manuscript request (I'm just underlining it because that news never gets old!) - which is set in 1939 to 1942.

What I've been pondering though is that parallax error between historical fact and historical fiction - or rather, how the collective subconscious perceives an historical period, compared to how the historical researchers and academics see a time, and which makes for the better read?

To give a couple of examples, I'm not writing a bodice ripper as such, but it's a popular genre - and often features a beautiful heroine in roughly the 18th century -  shall we say around 1780 - and you probably get a handsome highway man who's really the son of a Duke, or a scandalous countess with gambling debts and so forth - and a jolly good romp would be had by all.

But, if one reads into social history and consults documents of the time, would the characters concerned be as attractive if they were shown using the beauty preparations of the day, such as eyebrows made from mouse skin (grey was a popular colour for ladies hair), not to mention face cream made of puppy fat and large cut outs of galleons made of leather and stuck to the face. In those days, one or two teeth at adulthood still together in working order was considered a pretty good show, but it's not the impression we have from countless TV dramas where contemporary actors all have a fine set of gnashers, unless they are playing characters roles when snaggle tooth smiles are acceptable.

Think Vikings - never wore horned helmets until Hollywood said they should, indeed, a huge amount of Norse culture as been swept aside to present them as pillaging villains from 'The Vikings' to Mike the Knight - but would people buy an altogether more touchy feeling Viking story? 

In the end, I suspect it's mostly a case of the quality of writing, that a good author will create a good and believable world, and unless one is taking huge liberties with real events ( while pretending otherwise) then a little historical license is probably allowed - never letting the truth get in the way of a good story and all. It's interesting to ponder if the books we like to read are the ones which give us the image of the past we are familiar with, and because it's one we are familiar with, we deem them authentic - where as book that are researched up to the eyeballs can, on occasions, feel less authentic not because they are, but because they go against the grain of public perception, however wrong that perception is.

Of course, that is the ultimate attraction of historical novels that once one slips beyond living memory, then lots of things are up for grabs, it is always a best guess scenario - and even within living memory perception of events is a slippery eel indeed. The past is another country, and the best novels are like the best travel guides, they should make you feel you've been there and, when you turn the last page, wish you will be allowed to return some day.

In case you're wondering, the photograph was taken in 1944 at the liberation of Paris. Or it's supposed to be - there is some argument as to whether it was taken at the time, or staged a little while afterwards before the barbed wire was removed - or even staged in the 1950's as war nostalgia began to set in and memory softened. So, it's either two lovers sitting watch together and making a stand against fascism, or two actors paying tribute to and idea of themselves the French would rather acknowledge, then images like this - but both could be the seed for a hundred different stories.

Eight titles in search of a book

Do you ever do this? Come up with titles which sound amazing but you've no idea what the book is? I have a note book full of titles yet to be attached to books, though often the title does a lot of work for you by suggesting not only the genre and setting, but perhaps even the reader it might appeal to and a hint at the cover art.
After all, if you read a title 'The last husband on the shelf' you might imagine the front cover with a slightly cartoon image of a woman, probably in her late twenties, with the title written in pink script, slightly embossed, with maybe a touch of silver?
Though, if you cut it to 'The Last Husband' that has a hint that it might be a thriller, or even a horror classic - white letters ( again slightly raised) - somehow even more horrific if it's shortened further to-

THE HUSBAND - where you can almost imagine the bi-line 'until death do you part?'

Anyway - here are a few more - if you feel inspired, why not comment on what the genre, characters and even setting you think these ones might be, and who knows, maybe they'll some to life one day?

Mr Montague's bicycle.

Dream sliders.

Everything I'm not.

The baboon's revenge on the collective unconscious.

Execution city.

The Nightingale floor

The trials of Bunbery Rudge.

A house on a mandarin shore.

You can't beat the classics....

I don't write as much as I should in this blog, as sometimes I wonder who cares other than the people I see every day anyway. I don't meant that to sound depressive in a adolescent sort of a 'no one cares, it's pointless, why am I here' kind of a way, though that is the heart beat of my existence most days - but in a 'well, I'm not famous yet so no one really cares yet but they might one day' sort of a way.

Leaving that aside, I am writing a blog tonight because I am doing the most important part of a writers job, finding something else to do rather than what I should be doing. Which is odd, really, seeing as I love writing, so this is not a procrastination because of fear of work sort of a thing, but rather that I am bloody knackered tonight and I need some chill out time before I begin writing. Which is also odd, as I am choosing to write as a way of relaxing before I build up the energy to....write. Yes, well, I suppose that's only like a sprinter doing some warm up exercises really.

Anyway, I have just finished reading 'The great Gatsby' or at least listening to it on audio book. I love audio books, not least because they are the only chance I get to read these days as I am otherwise either writing my self or using both hands so can't hold a physical book, and also because I firmly believe that the key to all great writing is that it should be great reading also, and the quickest way to spot the difference is to listen - bad writing honks like an out of key tuba where as good writing is sweet as a symphony and should slip without hesitation into the mind of the listener. As I am working on the next and we hope basically final draft of my book 'And so we left for Paris', I am building up to reading the whole 100,000 words out loud, and may well record myself doing so to ensure that my work is as note perfect as I can get it - though there's nothing to say I'm not tone deaf, until THE AGENT agrees with me. That's the one who's waiting to read it, the one who's asked for the whole thing, so this is rather a big deal.

Any-ho - my brother hates the Great Gatsby, which is probably the result of being made to study it, a sure fire way to beat the joy out of every novel. He was also 17 or so at the time, and I think that perhaps it is a book you need to read when you're older, because you need to have had a few obsessive love affairs and reached that weird sense of failure mixed with ennui that only the onset of your thirties can bring - or maybe it was never quite his thing. He felt that everyone in the book is basically nasty and so why should we care about them - well, none of them are great as the title would suggest, but there is sympathy to be found in Gatsby himself, and for me, Daisy also.
Daisy is not likeable and not admirable, but very real. She is of course a poor little rich girl, the unwilling subject of Gatsby's obsession and trapped both in a loveless marriage and Gatsby's fantasy of her. She almost gives into Gatsby, plays along with his obsession because she's so lonely and sad in her own life, but she doesn't really love him and that sense of wanting to be loved but not by the person who loves you, came across to me clearly.

Why is it heralded as THE great American novel? Well, it is pretty amazing - though I'm not sure it's quite as seminal work as others claim it to be, despite Richard Fords reference to it in his book 'Canada' which I think is actually a greater book. It does show America at a time when it really was at the apex pf the world, where everything seemed possible after the first world war ended and before everything fell apart with the depression - a gilded time which was as insubstantial as Gatsby's dreams of Daisy. It also gives the lie to the American dream, that any man can rise to the highest position in society if only he works at it - as it underlines that no matter how a man like Gatsby tries, he'll never be an equal to those born to their position, such as Daisy's husband Tom. That's the real illusion that Gatsby chases, that he can cheat the system for real.

I think I'd quite like to write the story of how Gats became Gatsby, though I imagine someone else has got there before me, the story which is partially revealed throughout the book in hints and rumors, but that's for another project. The book made me think of Evelyn Waugh and his writing of the same period, there is I feel great similarity in their styles and the apparent easy gloss of the writing which hides something darker and more substantial underneath. It certainly makes me want to read more F Scott Fitzgerald, and there are images from the book which will stay with me for a long time - not least the giant eyes of the disheveled opticians billboard that over looks the sooty wastes of Queens and, like some comic god, looks down on the tragic events that lead up to the end. It's a great piece of dark humor, and for me hit all the right notes, like the sound of one of Gatsby's parties drifting over the lake.