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Category: writing (Page 15 of 15)

So where am I now?

August 13, 2012 /

Chris delivered The Adjacent to Simon Spanton of Gollancz at the end of last week and I’m really missing it! For the past two years I’ve had the privilege of living with this novel, unfolding in the background of everything I do. When you’re close to someone and you love their work, you can’t help but take that work into yourself, acclimatise yourself to it so that it comes to feel like a natural part of your working environment. Now it feels like a favourite music I’ve had playing on repeat has been switched off.

But the book is magnificent. Last week was my first opportunity to read it from beginning to end, chronologically and in order. It’s an extraordinary work, perhaps Chris’s most wide ranging and powerful to date. And as Blackadder might have said, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. The cumulative impact of the text as it reveals itself is immense. This book will, I feel, surprise and astound anyone who comes into contact with it.

So last week was a pretty big deal.

Hopefully this one will be also as work on my own novel continues and intensifies. I’m now, let’s see, almost 46,000 words into the second draft, well into Part Two and feeling good about it. Writing this book has been rather like trying to get comfortable in bed – not easy when your mind is in constant overdrive and the slightest sound can wake you but when you finally manage it you know it feels right. I now feel I know this book. Even if never entirely in control, I feel comfortable with what I’m doing. Perhaps this is why, after almost a year working on it, the book finally has a title.

The novel is called What Happened to Maree.

I read Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and felt disappointed. The premise appealed to me so much, but in the event what I found was a slight book, rather akin – in effect if not in subject matter – to last year’s Booker winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. At a sentence level, Swimming Home was finely worked and well above average. But in spite of everything Tom McCarthy says in his intro I found both the subject matter and its treatment bafflingly conventional, and the sketchy characterisation uncomfortably incapable of supporting the weight of significance placed upon it. Which was all a bit of a shame. The last chapter was the best.

I am now reading Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and loving every word of it. That man is my idol. I so need to watch and learn….

Black Static #29

July 20, 2012 /

Just received my copy of the latest Black Static, and can’t resist sharing the wonderful artwork, by Ben Baldwin, that accompanies my story ‘Sunshine’.

I think it looks great! I also really like the new format for the magazine. It’s smaller, but there are more pages. The interior looks cleaner and crisper and with the slightly larger font size it’s actually much easier to read. The whole production has a very pleasing ‘journal-like’ feel to it and I’m delighted to see ‘Sunshine’ included in its pages. There’s plenty of other good stuff in there too that I’m looking forward to catching up with, including a novelette by Ray Cluley and an interview with Nicholas Royle.

You can find more details and subscription links here.

Currently reading: Denis Johnson’s Angels, which is pretty astounding.

Currently listening to: Kathryn Williams’s Dog Leap Stair. I’ve had the album for ages, but suddenly rediscovered it again and have been playing it over and over again this week. I find it almost impossible to listen to music when I’m first-drafting, but when I’m second-drafting and if things are going well it’s sometimes OK. What tends to happen is that I’ll find an album that fits with my rhythm, that seems to complement my thoughts rather than interrupting them, that fuses into a kind of weird symbiosis with the story itself. The two works – the story and the album – often remain inextricably linked in my mind. Considering what I’ve been writing about this week, its relationship with Kathryn Williams seems totally bizarre, but that’s the way it sometimes comes out.

Anyway, it seemed to work, because that story’s done now. Pleased with that. Now to begin a read-through of the first draft of my novel…..

End-of-the-week thoughts

May 27, 2012 /

Weird. I see from these entries that it’s just about six weeks since I began work on what I thought would be the second draft of my novel. It feels much longer ago, probably because the book I’m writing now is completely different.

I did precisely one week’s work on that second draft before I realised that something was wrong. What was wrong was the entire first section of the book. I spent a day or so going ‘oh fuck’ (it was 35,000 words we were talking about, after all) before deciding to junk it.

It seemed the only thing to do. I didn’t think that what I’d written was bad, just that it did not fit. It was swinging the novel into a cul de sac. I still felt happy with the middle sections of the book, but I wanted to rewrite the beginning and I knew that if I did that it would mean rewriting the most of the final section also. In effect I would have lost three months’ work, possibly more.

‘Comfort’ may not be the right word, but what made me certain I was doing the right thing was knowing it was not the first time something like this had happened to me and far from it. I begin with characters and situations, never plots. The only way I can find out what one of my stories is about is by writing it, and sometimes – very nearly always – the story I begin with is not the story I eventually arrive at. A lot of words get discarded. It took me three false starts – about 8,000 unused words – before I got a proper handle on ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’, for instance. For a while it began to feel like one of M. R James’s infamous ‘stories I have tried to write’ and it’s absolutely true to say that it was only my attachment to the protagonist and his situation (oh, and my promise to Jon Oliver and his House of Fear) that kept me going with it.

Similarly with the novel. I had this core section – about 25,000 words – that seemed to me to be the essence of the novel, the book as I’d always imagined it, a narrator with a story to tell. I could not let her down.

I fixed my mind on that character, and started again at Page 1.

Now, six weeks on, I have a whole new Part One, and this week I made a good start on rewriting Part Four. The book’s SFnal quotient is significantly stronger and more defined, something that delights me immeasurably. Those who know me best know that I get terribly nervous and vague when talking about work in progress, but I think it’s OK to say I’m quietly excited.

The thing still doesn’t have a title, but I’m trusting that will reveal itself eventually.

Just finished rereading: M. John Harrison’s (dauntingly magnificent) Light and Nova Swing, in preparation for the third book in this trilogy, the forthcoming Empty Space. Next up: China Mieville’s Railsea.

More with the worldbuilding – literally

May 10, 2012 /

Reading this wonderful article in The Guardian about dollshouses and the people who make them, I was struck most especially by these words spoken by Jose Aleson, a guy from North London who fell into dollshouse-making by accident but now finds himself obsessed by it:

“It’s not to play with,  but you know what, there’s nothing more relaxing than sitting here at night, with the lights off, and all the lights on in the doll’s house, enjoying that moment. I like everything to be in order, and this is a kind of perfection. It’s like you’ve stopped time.”

For me this immediately conjured a scene from a story within a story: the man making the house and imagining it as a living entity within a world he himself has built, the writer writing about the creative dreamer who has built it.

There’s no denying the power that miniature houses exert over the imagination – the same pull that real houses have, I suspect, only distilled, concentrated in line with the reserves of imagination and commitment needed to create them. The finest dollshouses are undoubted works of art, but they are something else also. They are repositories of our dreams and sometimes also our fears.

I’ve loved dollshouse literature ever since I first read Rumer Godden’s 1947 novel The Doll’s House when I was eight or nine. Another favourite is Joyce Carol Oates’s tense and frightening short story ‘The Doll’. There’s something about this – the idea of losing control over a world you yourself have created – that is terribly frightening. But then there’s also that excitement of creation – of capture, of recreation of something lost – that feeds the maker’s obsession and makes him risk everything.

I messed around with these themes a little in my own story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Allen Ashley’s anthology Subtle Edens back in 2008. I remember thinking even then that I’d only brushed the surface of the subject  – there was Mr Ashley’s 6,000-word word limit to consider, after all. But the fascination hasn’t gone away and doesn’t seem likely to.

Something to think about on rainy days, no question. In the meantime I’ll be posting ‘Darkroom’ at the Featured Story page as a kind of placeholder……

Dolls house, 17th Century, German National Museum, Nuremberg

Jack in the Green

May 9, 2012 /

The Mayday Bank Holiday in Hastings is Jack in the Green day, a traditional or pagan festival that celebrates the ritual slaying of winter and the welcome release of summer into the world. It was a big thing in Hastings until the late 1880s, when the Victorians started grumbling that a more sedate maypole-type ceremony might be in order. A century later the old-style Jack was revived by the locals, and happily it’s now a big thing once again.

As I learned last winter when I attended my first Hastings annual bonfire parade, these rituals are taken seriously here, there’s a special atmosphere that surrounds them. Ancient rituals and beliefs feel very close to the surface. Everyone clearly has a great deal of fun – on Jack in the Green day literally thousands of bikers traditionally descend upon Hastings, the town swells to twice its normal size and yet the atmosphere remains enthusiastically inclusive, one-hundred percent family friendly – but beneath it all there’s something more than that, something old and ingrained, something whispered, elusive, mysterious. Walking around the Old Town and up through the Croft on Monday afternoon, what I kept thinking was: the thing, that indecipherable something we write about is still alive.

Taut bundles of leaves tied with bunting to the Old Town railings, banners featuring green images of Jack, a girl wearing a black velvet cloak and crowned with a circlet of flowers helping some guy start his motorbike, a biker buying a pint of prawns from one of the fish stalls down on the Stade. An odd, roughly made kind of magic, but magic definitely.

Motorbikes, Hastings sea front, May 2012

Shop window, Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings May 2012

(And definitely not unconnected) I’ve been making progress with the book. Today I felt truly excited, with that queasy excitement you get when something moves you, when a piece of writing finally feels like it’s going the way you imagined.

I want to write more about this, to share more, but at the moment each time I try I pull up short. I guess everything is going into the actual writing. More on this soon.

In the meantime here’s Naomi Wood instead, talking about the inspirations behind The Godless Boys. I wouldn’t say the book is perfect. I feel it has something of an ad hoc feel to it, mainly because some of the rationale behind the central premise (OMG am I actually talking about worldbuilding here?) feels insufficiently worked out. But what remains with me, what makes this novel special, is its sincerity. There are some beautiful moments in the prose, and a genuinely affecting ending. It is a Good Thing and so is Naomi. Go read her.

Thought for the day

April 16, 2012 /

Irvine Welsh in today’s Guardian describes his approach to plot as ‘just a big mess’:

“I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book’ll always be completely different by the time it’s finished. They say: ‘Where’s the book you were going to write?’ And I say, forget about it, it doesn’t exist.”

I am so getting that right now……

Turing’s plaque

April 2, 2012 /

Blue plaque for Alan Turing at Baston Lodge

I’m now into the final 5-10,000 words of the first draft of the novel. I was hoping to finish the draft this week but I don’t think it’s going to happen. This final little chapter is very important, and trying to get it right, even with 95,000 words already written, even in first draft which I know will all be changed anyway, feels like bearing a heavy weight uphill. It’s an exciting challenge though, and I relish those. I know what I have to write, just not – yet, quite – how.

During the afternoon I took a break from the actual writing and went for a stroll in the part of town where the chapter happens. There’s nothing like roaming around the houses for setting loose a storm of ideas, for me anyway, and at the very least I now have a renewed sense of place at the forefront of my imagination. My walk took me past the house where Alan Turing spent his childhood. It’s a sad story – Turing’s father was based in India so Alan was semi-adopted by a friend of his, the retired Colonel Ward – and I can’t help feeling that such a sensitive little boy must have retained some sense of displacement, even though this was the only life he knew. The British establishment’s later treatment of Alan Turing fills me with an anger so raw that the only appropriate way of channelling it would be to filter it through a story, something I would very much like to try and do one day.

In the meantime I have this place, and the honour of sharing space with a unique mind. Baston Lodge, long since converted into flats, sits silently in a quiet corner of an unsung town. The writer Rider Haggard lived just down the road. This lunchtime there was no one about. I stood outside on the pavement, thinking about Turing and about my story and trying to imagine myself backwards into 1913.

Baston Lodge, St Leonards on Sea

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