I read this, this morning, and it got me out of a foul mood that has been simmering for about a week. I’ve also been enjoying the short short stories Emma Lannie has been writing during her September project.
I’m sick of my novel. SICK, I tell you. Oh well, back to the coal face. I don’t have a break scheduled in for another three weeks.
My interview went okay, I think. Ted who did the show and Alison who was the multi-tasking producer said nice things to calm my nerves. I talked for a bit. Interesting job, interesting book. Someone rang in to ask me what A Levels you needed to take to be a writer. I was about to say ‘don’t bloody bother,’ but instead I was sensible and said something like ‘follow your heart.’
I think I went blind with fright about half way through the interview. I’m not joking. You know when you stand up suddenly and your vision kind of goes brown and wobbles? That is what happened to me. When I complained about being starving, I was offered a Eucalyptus Throat Pastille. When the blindness passed, there were more questions and I started feeling sicky.
Then when there was some music on for a little break my friend Rob, who had come with me to help me navigate, work doors and generally Cope (thank you) reminded me the parking meter probably needed feeding and I fumbled for money and Ted gave me £1. We didn’t use it for the meter. It is on its own shelf in my red bookcase as a memory of the event.
I think if you wanted to listen to me burbling and choking back panicky tears, you could click here. But that might be the wrong link. My constitution is too delicate to allow me to listen again.
I am off to do my reading tonight and I am scared.
Mainly I am scared because I don’t like lots of people in the same room all looking at me all at once.
And also because I will have to drive there and it is going to be on a motorway and that is worrying.
I am hoping to combat the fear by these two methods:
1. New windscreen wipers for the car, so I can still see if it rains.
2. Stripy socks and red shoes.
So if you are there and you want to talk to me but you haven’t seen me in real life before, I will be wearing stripy socks and red shoes. This might be a little bit of an ice-breaker.
I am starting a MA in creative writing. You can apply for it by emailing me and if I accept you, you will be allowed to drink my tea at my house and do all the modules. It will cost £3085 and the learning will be ‘experiential’.
Module 1: Dealing with Rejection
I will lock you in my cellar and scream ‘you are crap’ at you at random intervals. Sometimes I will throw things. Every now and again I will come down into the cellar and give you a cuddle and stroke your hair. I will say, ‘such talent!’ and when you are relaxed and smiling I will quickly punch you in your stomach and say ‘but still crap!’
Module 2: Writing Process
I will tie you to my writing chair. I might let you have a cushion. You are allowed to get up to go to the bathroom and to drink water. But nothing else. Your phone will beep a lot and eventually the friends you are ignoring will get angry with you, give up, and go away. When you are trying to write I will randomly delete paragraphs of your work and whisper things like ‘all your friends think you are a pillock’ into your ears.
Module 3: Drafting
Every time you write something I will print it out and show it to all my friends. We will sit in a pub and laugh at it. We will make notes on it in coloured pens. Everything we write will be instructions on how to make it better. We will send you back the pages. You won’t be able to read our writing. You will need to implement all the suggestions into future drafts, even when they are contradictory. We will print out your future drafts and take them back to the pub. This will take a very long time.
Module 4: Publicity and Promotion
I will teach you how to Google yourself. You will do this every day, until you are banned from using the computer at work. At the end of the course you will have to drink a bottle of gin and then read your work to me. I will talk loudly and send text messages to random people while you are reading. I will ask you to sign your book and then sell it on ebay. I will send you the ebay link. No-one will buy your book even though the bidding starts at 1p and the postage is free.
There might be some more modules. I am not sure yet. For the full MA experience I will lose your final submission and give you a certificate I made on MS Word and laminated at work. I will look you up a few years later and me and all my friends will tell you you can’t write because you did my MA course and you now sound just like everyone else who has done it. Then I will ask you for some more money in return for providing ‘editorial help’ with your manuscript.
I’ve got all the accessories for being a writer. I have got a blue typewriter and a brown reading chair and a red bookcase and a fountain pen and some computery type things with keyboards. And paper. I’ve loads of that. I’ve got a few notepads and three expensive notepads for special ideas. I’ve got a stash of scrap paper beside the bed, just in case.
And my love for Biro pens is genuine and steadfast.
Did I mention I was moody? I like drinking on my own, scowling, and looking out of train windows into the rain. I especially like imagining what I am looking like when I do this.
The only keyboard short-cut I know is the one for Word Count. I also know how many words I can type per minute.
I can use words like ‘climax’ and ‘flashback’ and ‘resolution’ and ‘character development’ in a way that sounds like they might mean something.
I have decided from now on I am only going to write shopping lists. And maybe memos at work. But possibly not.
I was reading Me and My Big Mouth and was, as is the way of the Internet, diverted to this, which I think is good. They aren’t accepting entries until the beginning of November – but that isn’t very far away.
The reason I think it is good is because the connections between the stories (I think (hope)) are going to be little impulsive leaps of association rather than the blunt cause and effect that links the incidents and accidents that exist in plotted writing.
I like wandering, almost plotless stories. They are more real to me and I have been trying to write like that. I can’t remember who said it but I have read that if you have a gun on the set in Act One, you have to have it going off in Act Three. I wonder about that. It seems very anti-realist to me. Most of my puzzling time is spent trying to work out why I do things, or don’t do them. Real life doesn’t have the calmness of a novel. There isn’t beginning, middle and end; conflict, development and resolution. Not unless you are dead anyway.
Perhaps other people have psyches that are more integrated than mine? The constant mystery of my motives – and other people’s – is one of the things that makes me want to write. Not to figure it out, but to demonstrate how arbitrary and chaotic some of our choices are. There isn’t a cause.
Perhaps I do like cause and effect, but it is a cause and effect of emotion, rather than events, which answers to a logic that I’m not grown-up enough to have deciphered yet.
And yet I do like very plotted novels. I like good crime fiction and I like thrillers too – most of these have to be well constructed and logical for them to ‘work’ in the terms of their own genre. They are, to my way of thinking, avowedly anti-realist because they are logical and comprehensible and so a kind of escapism for me.
I can’t think of any way I would like to conclude this post. I am not sure that I spelled ‘comprehensible’ right, and the little one spilled a tea-pot on my dictionary today. I am also not sure if it is ‘spelled’ or ‘spelt’ – I think it depends which side of the Atlantic you are on. I hate writing in public.
I’ve decided I don’t like being rejected much. For all the smug commentary about the process being more important than the project, my claims to prefer being a writer than one who has written, etc etc, I am not too keen on the little letters and emails I get every now and again. There isn’t a way not to take it personally because the writing is personal. I might make most of it up, but no-one else could make it up in that way except for me, so when someone says no, it puts me in a bad mood.
Other things that put me in a bad mood are: little one caking her head in Vaseline when I am trying to benignly-neglect her and write another paragraph, using one of my bare feet to stand on a little metal train from the train set, finding my cat has had his upset stomach under the kitchen table (I am sorry, little one, for blaming the smell on you), not being able to find the paying in book for my savings account, having to answer the phone and the recycling man not taking the cardboard in the recycling box because I put it out too early and it got rained on.
The main thing is the writing though. It should be enough, I think, to have finished it and checked the punctuation and given it a nice title and printed it out. I have a little stash of them in a drawer, muttering patiently about their fur-coats of dust. Despite all the stereotypes that abound about writerly types, no-one is such a loner (not me, anyway) that they wouldn’t like someone to read what they have written.
Or it should be called something other than rejection, like ‘deciding to be just friends’ instead of ‘dumped by text for your mother on Valentine’s day.’
Sometimes when I am in a bad mood I think about buying a really big bag of very tiny mega-bounce balls in neon swirly colours, and throwing them from the top of a very high building. Of course I would make sure that no-one was about first. I am going to make all my stories into paper aeroplanes and go onto the top of Preston Bus Station’s multi storey car-park and fly them off the top and MAKE people read them. Bastards, all of you.
The title of this post is a quotation from a Guardian books blog. I can’t remember who it was or what it was about but the phrase tickled me and so I kept it on a bit of paper. If I can find him again I will credit him properly. He was writing about bloggers. I bet his mum is really pleased about how clever he is. Dilettante is a word I first heard from one of my friends. I did not know what it meant so I decided to look it up but it took a very long time because I coudn’t think how to spell it.
Tonight I am going to write about other people. Except it won’t really be about other people – all of these posts and my emails and telephone calls and conversations generally and much of the novel writing and story writing is sort of about other people but mainly circling about myself and a way for me to find out what I think about things. I have written about needing an audience and not liking solitude for the writing and I have written about liking to explore the dark place between what people think they are and how they appear and what they really are.
It is a kind of arrogant thing for a writer to decide that they know what someone really is and not just what they appear to be. And that they are going to write about it in a way that is going to make their character look silly or funny or sad. It is what I have tried to do with most of my writing. I knew it was sort of arrogant at the time but it was too interesting to stop doing it and I think what people write about is more or less the same as what colour cardigans they wear – it is something that is interesting but does not have a moral dimension. So it is all right to lie or be cruel in typing because it is not real. I am not really sure if I agree with that, but that is all right, I can think about it some more in the next fifty years or so I might have on this planet.
Mainly I am thinking about other people. There are about two or three people in the world I can stand to have in the room with me for any amount of time, but not at the moment. At the moment the number has dwindled to none and I am quite liking my cardigan and my night-times and enjoying the not-irritated feeling of being on my own. There is a thought blooming about being unread, and unwritten, and selves and rubbish and dark places but I can’t get hold of it.
The writing is going better. I think it is because when I am with other people I am often not really with them but with myself wondering if I have said the wrong thing or not said enough of the right things. With the typing saying the wrong thing and not enough of the right things is all right, it is better and it is important and you can delete it anyway. I would quite like to try being on my own (apart from working and mothering) for a long time. I would need to wash less, not go and get my hair cut and not worry about saying the wrong thing. This would free up a lot of brain space.
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