There are a lot of creative writing courses around at the moment, all explicitly or implicitly promising something that it seems to me is never quite specified. A short-cut to success, perhaps. 

The truth of the matter is that good writing requires dedication and hard work. And certain opportunities and resources. Many failures, little hope of success. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. Leaving aside questions of talent, you have to be willing, as I think Will Self said in the Guardian recently, to submit yourself to long periods of solitary confinement. It’s a lonely job, and if you can't hack that, don't apply. It also involves a peculiar kind of relationship with the world. A distance. Writers should never belong to anything. They should be the grit in the oyster. Difficult. Awkward. Outsiders.

In our society, writers are like priests. We don't on the whole believe in organised religion, but we do believe in art, and in particular the word. We also live in a society in which, thanks largely to the internet, everyone can claim attention through the word with the minimum effort. We can all be writers. Result: the triumph of opinion over knowledge. Nobody need submit themselves to the long years of hard work and study needed to master a subject, or to create a work of art.

I wonder how many times I have heard fellow creative writing students say, I've not done much writing lately..? I've said it myself. Yet much effort goes into talking about writing, and to chat about this or that opportunity, or just chat. It's lovely, but it’s not the real thing.

The thing about a creative writing course is that in a sense it doesn't matter if you succeed or not. What constitutes success is an open question. But it’s not like training to be, say, a nurse or a pilot, or a lorry driver. The job of writing for a living does not require you to hold any qualifications (arguably journalism is an exception, but creative writing courses include none of the emphasis on productivity that journalism courses do).

Of course there are some people who come on creative writing courses who do have the stuff that writers are made of, and there are useful things to be gained from the best courses if you are that sort. But these people probably will be writers anyway. Whether what they will write will be as good is a different question.

Meanwhile, the courses attract large numbers of hopeful would-be writers who for a while and a fee can tell themselves they are what they want to be. Some will succeed. Most won't.

There are no short cuts. Anything more than therapy in writing (and I don’t belittle that) depends on talent, hard work, sacrifice, contacts, and luck. On the will to communicate and on having something to say. Everything else follows from that.
 
 

It is perhaps received wisdom that new writers of fiction over the age of about 40 don't have a hope of publication, at least by the major houses . This belief seems to be supported by the total absence of any major prize for a writer under that age and often much younger than that. There are no publishers specialising in the works of older writers, at least by new older writers. Middle or old age is only a virtue on the blurb on the cover if the author has been publishing for ages and has a string of awards to his / her name.   
   If this is true then I suspect at the root of it is good old fashioned ageism. The publishing industry, like the rest of the media, seems obsessed with youth. In a more charitable mood I would like to believe it is because publishers and agents like to invest in long term relationships with their authors whom they hope to nurture to a point where they will bring a decent return. A writer in his or her sixties may not live long enough to see that return.
  My charitable mood isn't very charitable and doesn't last very long. I suspect the received wisdom is that a writer who hasn't made a serious commitment before the age when most people have settled down to a mortgage and a steady job isn't ever going to be much good.
  Perhaps it has something to do with what Muriel Gray described as Rural Teacher Syndrome in her address before the announcement of the Organge Prize in 2007. It seems she complained of the mediocrity of most of the novels that were submitted. Most of them, she said, were barely disguised autobiographies about falied marriages, lost babies and / or dead-end careers. She mourned the "inability to translate one's own experience into something larger, stronger and frankly more interesting than the life which produced it."
  While I applaud the need for novels that transcend the author's own experience, her views seem to beg a number of questions. Is this particular kind of mediocrity confined only to female writers? Or do male authors have their own types of ordinariness? Blood on the board room floor? If it is as hard to get published as some people claim, why are these things produced at all?  
  Getting back to my theme of older writers and the discrimination they face, I wonder if there might be a tendency for people who start writing later in life (after  marriage children and careers perhaps) to look back on and somehow try to make amends or understand what the hell went wrong through the act of writing fiction.
  If - and it seems to me a big if - older writers are indeed so inclined then they will indeed contribute to their own obscurity relative to their younger counterparts. I doubt that is a sufficient explanation, but it may be true at least in part. The rest I suspect may be ageism. I for one refuse to accept the ageist stereotype that all that is left in old age is history and regret. 
 
 


I came across the following Q & A on the website for Narrative Magazine It starts with a question directed to Robert Olen Butler, who seems to be a well known American writer (at least in America). You can read the article here. The question asked by a young poet, Lauren Bidden, who responds to Butler's suggestion that writers should write “absolute dreck,” “god-awful novels,” “dreadful short stories” every day." as part of the learning process. An author should not be afraid of "certain failure."

But, she says, if writing is a painful process "that requires that we touch the rawest parts of our memory, sense, and emotion", how can we overcome the inevitable sense of failure that follows from the creation of an unsuccesful work? More exactly,  "When does one revise, and when does one move on?"

Butler's reply echoes Beckett's exhortation, "Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." He says that as a novice he wrote many novels, plays, stories, all of which deserved never to be published. "I’m not speaking of craft and technique. Much of the work was not bad technically. But there was something terribly wrong with my process, as an aspiring artist. I was writing from my head. I was writing from ideas. I was willing the work into being. I was failing to let my work generate itself from my unconscious, from the place where I dream. I relied on the relatively minor technical successes to deceive myself about the overall quality of what I was doing artistically. When at last I came to understand that I was basically looking in the wrong place in myself for my stories and novels, I finally started to write—and publish—the work that articulates my deepest sense of the human condition."

As for when to revise and when to move on, he says, somewhat cryptically, that "when you truly know it’s coming from your deepest white-hot center, from the place where you dream, then revise with a passion", otherwise put it aside. How do you know? Well, he says that as a teacher there are some "pretty clear ways of doing that." but doesn't specify what they are or how an inexperienced author is supposed to know without the help of such a teacher.
 
For all that I go with Bob Butler's advice to try not to be afraid of failure (hard though it is to follow) I am disappointed by the way he resorts to a kind of mystical mush to explain how the process of critical self-evaluation works. I accept that the process may not be entirely 'visible' but that does not mean we have to abandon all efforts to undertstand rationally what works and what doesn't, and why. Neither should we seek formulae to explain when a piece works or not. Head and heart have to learn to work together. It is an iterative process.
 
DID they do it? 11/24/2009
 
I recently heard of a case Dissociative Identitity Disorder (DID). This rare and somewhat contested condition is thought to result from experience of extreme stress, in particular childhood sexual abuse. Sufferers are said to have many, sometimes dozens, of personalities and for this reason the condition used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In this instance the victim had been systematically tortured by a group of men for many years since infancy.
  In my recent research work in prisons, during which I interviewed a number of older prisoners, I met many who were there because they had committed sexual offenses against children. I don't know exactly what they did, except in a few cases, though some of them were serving very long sentences. I know that all of them came across to me as reasonable, often likeable people, who seemed to me like blokes everywhere, who were interested in the welfare of their family and friends, their minor ailments, work, money, football, and so on.
  Is it possible that some of the men I met had also done, or wanted to do, or watched pictures of people doing the sort of things to others that the men described above did. Did those men also have jobs, families, pets, mortgages, and enjoy a game of football?
  Alan Bennett wrote a monologue, called Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which concerns an 'ordinary' suburban housewife who murders her husband who has for years been abusing her, not just alone but often in front of and with the help of other men. One of these other men, whom she has never seen, turns out to be the narrator's husband, himself an ordinary man, who is revealed by his habit of whistling softly through his teeth, a sound she overheard often while the men took their pleasure of her.
  I don't think we can say that those who do such things are very different from those who don't. The difference is that they do them. The point is you can't always tell them apart.
 
 
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler:

The poems of Li Po and Tu Fu, translated by Arthur Cooper 

Childhood Memories and Screen Memories, fro The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, by Sigmund Freud

Freud and False Memory Syndrome, by Phil Mollon

Ezra Pound, Selected Poems by Thom Gunn

Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form, in The New Short Story Theories, ed Charles May

The Lonely Voice, by Frank O'Connor

The Modernist Short Story, by Dominic Head

The Short Story in English, by Walter Allen

The Observer's Book of Birds, by S. Vere Benson

Doing Prison Work, by Elaine Crawley

Liquid Love by Zygmunt Bauman

Various stories from Grey Area, Tough Tough Toys, and The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self

Dubliners by James Joyce
 
 
This book, first published in 1960 and long out of print though still available, is the perfect companion for the bird lover, as useful at the fireside as it is in the field. It is in itself a little work of art. The illustrations are each reproductions of paintings rather than photographs, some in colour but many in black and white. Though they seem a little posed and lack something of the 'high definition clarity we expect now, nevertheless they give an impression of the vitality of each bird that is quite captivating. 

Though the pictures are wonderful for me it is the text that accompanies the pictures that is so thrilling. Each one presents a short general description followed by a sentence each on haunt, nest, eggs, food and notes. The writing is superb and often poetic. The Goldfinch, for example, is described as having "A high tinkling twitter, reminiscent of Japanese wind-bells. Song, similar and fairy like." Or that of the Chaffinch: " ...a high rollicking cadence ending up with a flourish." Such eloquence is based on long practised observation.

In hindsight, the book also offers a fascinating insight into social attitudes towards the natural world. The preface, for example, contains an affectionate recollection of how the author rescued a Guillemot that was covered in oil. It is a description from a time when such things were of less concern than they are now, and marks an early example of ecological activism that perhaps we are too used to reading about. The Foreword is written by Frances, Countess of Warwick, a supporter of the Bird Lovers' League and admirer of "the Misses Benson." Though it is not uncommon now, nor was then, for such books to contain little peons of praise from some distinguished figure, this seems to me to particularly reflect the long standing association in Britain between the aristocracy and their (assumed) natural guardianship of the environment. She acutely observes the then growing interest in animal and bird life from that of "a very small section of the community...whose circumstances enabled them to indulge their inclination..." to something more widespread. It contains an irony that would seem to have been missed, perhaps due to a peculiar sort of myopia that is characteristic of those who pursue certain causes out of sentiment. The Countess notes that the members of the League have each "pledged himself or herself never to keep a bird in a cage..." while at the same time noting that she has "over four hundred in my aviary here...rescued from unsuitable conditions." No doubt they were kept with good intention and were better off than before, but I cannot imagine anyone making such a remark or failing to spot such an irony now.

Handy in its size and scope for the task of practical bird-watching, this book is a product of solid field craft that opened the eyes of a generation to the birds around them. It is one of the treasures of British naturalism.

 
 
Grey Lag 06/28/2009
 

For a while now I've had the notion to write a novel about a man who is sent to prison for the first time in old age. His crime is 'historical' - it happened thirty years or more before he is sent down.

I've met a number of chaps in this position during my research in prison. I became intrigued by their experience, and by comments made by them but also by prison officers that some of them were in all likelhihood innocent. What is it like, I thought, to reach your retirement and to find yourself suddenly accused of a serious crime and sent to prison. What is it like to be released having lost almost everything as a consequence of the sentence?

We live in a society that seems to be obsessed with sex, and the infantilisation of sex, too. Most of the chaps I interviewed for my research were in prison for rape or sexual assault. Many of them said they had been stitched up by their families or by the victim or by someone they knew. Of course, they would say that, wouldn't they? But some of the officers I spoke to said the evidence they had been convicted on was thin to say the least. What level of proof can be achieved after thirty years without dna evidence?

I began to ask myself, 'what if a man who has led an outwardly exemplary life, perhaps a public figure of some sort, is suddenly accused of having committed a serious crime decades ago and is sent to prison for it? What is that like? What are the effects on his family? It seems to me there are likely to be a number of, shall we say, thresholds of conflict. For example, there is the conflict within him - did he do it? How is he going to deal with guilt if he should feel any? What lies / statements / confessions will he tell to escape? There's the conflict between him and his family, his wife, for example. What secrets have lurked in their relationship? Is she surprised by the accusation? Did she know all along? If so, what stories did she tell to herself? And the children - how does it affect them? Exactly who - or what - is their father?  What of the victim? How straightforward are his or her motives? How reliable are her memories, and his?

Now, I'm not usually sold on the novel as a fictional form, not per se. I prefer the short story. But as I say in my lectures on doing research, use the right tools for the job: don't pick the job for the tools. Writers need to be able to work in many forms. It seems to me that this is a subject for a novel. There are simply too many influences on the outcome, too many lines of action and motivation to be handled by a short story form. That still leaves a question of the right form for this novel, and just now that is to be decided, but a novel it most surely is.

So a few days ago I dived in. A novel seems to me to be too complex a thing to make to work without some degree of planning. This is a story that must run over many years, decades even, though I may in the end foreground only part of that process. Not only do I need a long time line, I need a location. In my experience novice writers tend to shy away from setting their work in particular places and times, prefering an imaginary landscape that has few points of reference outside the psychology of the the protagonist. I think this is a mistake. I believe the universal, if I can put it like that, is best achieved through the particular.

My basic plot is as follows: Arthur Means, my protagonist, is making some kind of public appearance. I don;'t know what just now but I know he needs to be visible. Among the people who are looking at him is one who has not seen him for many years. She (my antagonist) realises he is the man who raped her when she was fifteen.

Encouraged by her family or friends (I haven't decided yet) she takes action. She easily finds out where Arthur lives and throws a brick through his window. Then a few days later she posts a threatening letter through the door. The poilce trace the letter and question her. She - her name is Millicent - turns out to be from the very opposite end of society to the one that Arthur is used to. But under questioning she makes some serious allegations about Arthur, allegations that have to be taken investigated. Somehow (I haven't figured out how yet) Arthur is charged and brought to court. He is found guilty and sentenced to five years

I think that if the novel were to stop here it might provide a satisfying enough framework, though it would leave out his expeience of living in prison, something I know a bit about and which I find intriguing in itself. The first part could be that of his sinning. The second his descent into hell. It would require a third, a ressurection, of sorts.

All this is no more than a sketch of the boundaries - a stage if you like on which to enact the play. Of far more importance is the feeling that drives the story, which as in every story will come through action and character but needs ito come from something in me. I'm not sure what that feeling is, and I can only hope that my sense that I have such a feeling will be borne out in the writing. Arthur, Millicent and Charlotte need each to have voices. Henceforth, apart from such planning and research as is necessary, it is an adventure into unknown territory

 
 

For some time I've wondered at the difference between dialogue in drama and in fiction. Though there are parallels I've never been quite sue they are the same. Apart from the obvious differences, such as fiction using 'he said / she said' and so on, and dialogue in drama providing almost all the structure around which action is built, I think there is fundamentally something different about the two forms.

Now I must say I love dialogue. Dialogue should move the action along at least as much and probably more than the narrative. Dialogue is what makes fiction interesting for me. Great writers handle dialogue with dexterity and taste, using neither too much or too little. Look at the way James Joyce., or Raymond Carver for example use dialogue within their work. Take away a phrase and the things falls apart. Dialogue gives a psychological location in space and time, it gives history, indeed it makes history live.

So why don't I want to write for the screen or stage? I think I like the tension between dialogue and narrative, the multiplicity of voices that fiction allows, the infinite shades of irony that between them. Maybe it is not so much that dialogue in fiction is different from that in drama but that its is used diferently and to do different things. Narrative provides a different context in which to explore and evoke relationships, different from that afforded by a stage or a visual image of a location.

 
The Need to Read 08/13/2008
 

Yesterday, Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, gave us the benefit of her views on reading in Free Thoughts, a feature on BBC Radio 3 in which various writers and thinkers (are they separate beings?) each have been giving two minutes’ worth of their own precious distilled experience. Jane spoke of the importance of “an amazing technology" which people have "to explore and record the nature of the human condition”. It comprises “complex grammatical structures, highly flexible metaphors and syntax, and innumerable permutations of form.” She is talking about written language, which “more than any other form represents the sense, the structure, the smell, as it were, of experience itself.” The words on the page move into our brains, altering its chemistry. Reading, she argues, is second only to sex and eating in its primal significance and pleasure. Good writing, she says, is hard to achieve, and hard reading is “so temptingly easy to avoid.” The mental workout of reading Paradise Lost is equivalent to that of going to the gym – seen as good for us, if only we have the time, the energy, the inclination. 

We live frenetic, fragmented lives, into which we fit bits of experience, imagining they make up a whole. Reading hard demands a different pace. It is a paradox that we often assign reading to the last few moments of the day, a throwback to our childhoods, perhaps, when we listened to a bed-time story, or even further when we gathered around the camp fire at night to hear stories that gave sense and significance to our fears and helped to allay them. If nothing else, this should confirm the importance of stories for us. Though it is reassuring that we also choose to use reading as the preferred way to fill time when we are obliged to sit still, on the train or the aeroplane. The need to read is there, always; but if Jane is right, and I think she is, we have lost sight of how much it can do for us and of how much we can do for it.

Like many people, I commute to work, where I spend long hours, and arrive home tired and with the feeling that I’ve done what is necessary, but not what is significant. But I have lately discovered a new found land, my America, in the shape of audio books, easily and cheaply downloadable from the Internet. My drive to work drive lasts 75 minutes each way; enough time to get deep into a good book. So far I have listened to three volumes of In Search of Lost Time, most of Ulysses, most of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina, as well as more recent stuff such as Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. Often I have found myself so engrossed in what I am listening to that I have no recollection of having travelled at all. They may say of me one day that he died of literature!

Useful though audio books are in providing access to ‘difficult’ literature they do not provide quite the same experience as reading it. It is true that they offer fast, direct access to the story, and in a good reading, many of the aural qualities of the text. But because one is swept along by the flow of the actor’s reading one can also miss many of the details that make reading seriously both hard and rewarding.

I wonder how many people who say they aspire to write do not in practice give equal weight to reading? How much is lost if, as an aspiring writer of fiction, one reads Shakespeare with less assiduity than, say, Zadie Smith? or J.K Rowling (I mean, of course, no disrespect to Ms Smith or Ms Rowling).

Jane Davis has devoted much of her life to bringing literature “down from the shelf”, as she puts it, and “into the hands of people who need it.” She states in her Free Thought that we need “the added brain power and meditative reflection that reading can bring”. To do so I think we need to learn to regard and accept classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, to which she refers in her Thought and which was written down 4000 years ago, as being at least as s important to our everyday life as any modern novel or story in the press. Not that they’re the same, but I think that neither should be shrouded in mystery. Gilgamesh is a great read, and its eponymous hero a complex character, full of recognisable virtues and vices, dealing with a problem we can easily identify with.

Thanks to Jane Davis for her insight and her enthusiasm.

 

 
 

In the Guardian Review of August 2nd 2008, Gao Xingjian, the exiled Chinese writer and Nobel laureate makes a remark that has been said in one way or another by many writers. Reflecting on his years in China under a Communist government that banned his work and drove him into exile he remarks it was “impossible to say freely what you thought, even in your family…Everything people say in those circumstances is false; everybody is wearing a mask. It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

This week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died. He too had spoken out against his government, and had been imprisoned and sent into exile for it. I remember I read eagerly his books when I was in my early twenties: Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and also a book of shorter fiction: We Never Make Mistakes. One story in this book, Incident at Kretchetovka Station struck me very powerfully at the tme. As far as I can recall, it concerns the arrival of a train full of Russian soldiers at a remote railway station somewhere in the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. The soldiers had spent much of the war as prisoners of the Germans. They are returning home now, but not to a hero’s welcome. They are all destined for the labour camps or execution. In the logic of the regime it was impossible for a Soviet soldier to have surrendered: all such men had to be deserters. The story itself, as far as I can recall, involved a Red Army soldier whose humanity and loyalty to the party is tested when he confronts one of the men on the train. I can’t remember the action or the ending. I do remember I wrote a one-act play about it, called, The Eyes of the State. It was probably dreadful. But I’m sure there was something about the sense of injustice which ran through the story that appealed to me. I found I could identify with the oppressed and betrayed heroes in the play. No doubt I associated my own experience of being an 'oppressed' teenager with that of the returning soldiers.

Naïve though I was in many aspects of my association, I certainly believed that literature provided the only true life. My experience of oppression was mainly through my familiy, who were in fact far from oppressive, though I didn't think so at the time. Young people think strongly of the need to break free of boundaries that are imposed by others. No doubt Solzhenitsyn's story seemed to reflect my own awareness of oppression and injustice enough to inspire me to engage with it through writing. And though the differences in scale were vast in terms of talent, experience and so on, perhaps that was when I first became aware of that paradoxical truth to which Gao Xingjiang alludes.