In for a Penny

I sent submissions to seven agents. One rejection so far and, realistically, the probability is rejections from the rest too. I don't say this out of self-deprecation or false humility, just an awareness of the numbers game involved.

In the meantime, I'm writing. The work in progress is making headway, but I find myself looking at a hefty m/s at the end of it. My general view is that the m/s should be as short/long as it needs to be and bloat should be excised without mercy, but even allowing for that it still looks like a lengthy story. My plan was/is to have three stories intertwine; the first of these is drafted and has had a rough revision, but is still 10,000 words longer than I anticipated. I thought about changing the plan and making it two intertwined stories to make the wordcount manageable, but this does thematic damage to what I'm trying to pick at in the subtexts. So I think I'm going to go for the full thing and let it go where it goes before a brutal revision.

More generally, all my stuff exists only in the form of working/revision prints (that will eventually get shredded) or out there in the cloud. I think I'm going to format and print my earlier stuff and put it into ring binders so at least some evidence of it exists.

The Moronic Inferno Revisited

In 1983, Martin Amis wrote:

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. The transformation is more or less inexorable. (The Moronic Inferno)

I was reminded of this back in August when, like lots of other people, I read Heather Demetrios's How to Lose a Third of a Million Dollars Without Really Trying.

There are reasons to question Amis's opinion, but in this case it seemed apposite. The core of Demetrios's piece is that she got a great advance, left her job, and headed to Brooklyn and lived the life of a famous writer—until reality set in. She thought she could buy a lifestyle but, despite awards and acclaim, not enough people bought her books.

I'm not writing this to criticise Demetrios; she took flak from plenty of people after her cautionary tale and I don't really have any reason to add or subtract from that, although, at the risk of sounding snotty, I thought the piece could really have done with an editor: it didn't entice me to read any of her fiction. Rather, I want to go off on a tangent from her piece.

I'd also like to refer to a Guardian piece from 2016 by Ros Barber: For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way. In her article, Barber lists her seven reasons for not self-publishing:

• You have to forget writing for a living
• Self publishing can make you behave like a fool
• Gatekeepers are saving you from your own ego
• Serving an apprenticeship is important
• You can forget Hay and the Booker
• You risk looking like an amateur
• 70% of nothing is nothing

The list doesn't strike me as especially convincing, insofar as it comes laden with the baggage of a set of assumptions. Again, I don't want to criticise Barber; her list is personal and real to her. But for me it tickles the same tangents as Demetrios: the fetishisation of writing and being a writer, and expectations of what that means.

A lot of what I see in the media and on social media about writing and ‘being a writer’ I find absurd, either for its pretension, its self-delusion, or both. A lot of that is to do with elevating the act of writing into something like a sacred vocation and consequently sanctifying the participants in the rite (which the real professionals never do.)

For me, writing is something I do: it is not my identity. I have no lapel badges proclaiming 'I'm a writer, look at me. Me, Me, Me.' Mini-bios, on what little social media I do, don't identify me as 'a writer.’ I am simply someone who takes pleasure in working out a story then trying to turn that story into a piece of writing, taking cues from others whose work I enjoy (George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Dorothy Dunnett, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Priest, and others.)

I'm privileged. I retired, early, with a pension that is sufficient to live on; we own our house outright and our kids are grown up. This means I can write in my hack way for the simplest of reasons: I want to write. That doesn't mean I'm content to write badly: I want to write as well as I can and keep improving; there is aesthetic joy in that, in the act of creation for its own sake. But it matters not a jot if anything I write is ever published.

Nor, at the risk of setting a hobby horse loose from its stable, have I any interest in the MFA (as Demetrios pursues.) When Frank Zappa was once asked about the sources of America's ills, he said

Well, two important things, and each one of them has only three letters: One was LSD, a chemical which is capable of turning a hippie into a yuppie, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. And the other is MBA. When people started taking MBA seriously, that was the beginning of the ruination of the American industrial society.

In the context of writing, I'd add the MFA, and for much the same reason, the ruination of literary society. I'm not aware of reading anything from someone with an MFA that I've enjoyed or, failing enjoyment, appreciated. It all reads the same to me, and most of it is dull. Of course, you don't have to do an MFA to be dull, but it acts to institutionalise the dullness and call it style. That is a crass generalisation, but nevertheless I find it consistently true, and, if that is a hostage to fortune, then so be it.

This post has turned into more of a rant than a considered piece leading to a considered conclusion. I’m not sure, in truth, if I have a considered conclusion to draw, except maybe this: even as a hack scribbler, the focus of my efforts should not be on dreams of an imaginary status, but on the writing: the sequencing of words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, and the crafting of those into something that entertains, amuses and, with a bit of luck, resonates.

Heart of Purpleness

A second Star Wars novel bites the dust. Much better, though still written for a target demographic that finds depth in a shallow puddle.

Although it was better written it was also annoyingly written, full of paragraphs with separate, single-sentence payoffs

Like this.

It's written how Jeremy Clarkson speaks.

It's based on, or at least takes as its point of departure Conrad's Heart of Darkness but the author isn't Conrad. That's OK, very few people are Conrad, but it undermines the intended impact of the book I think. Most obviously, I wasn't convinced that the internal monologue and travails of the protagonist were those of a Jedi Master. It's essentially an episode when it could have been more than that. On the other hand, firstly I don't think the publisher was wanting anything more and, second, I suspect the writer was trying to slip things in that would otherwise have bypassed the target audience, which is admirable.

Second Draft

My novel A Dream of Magic is now in second draft. No doubt it will change further but right now my brain hurts.

Getting it to this stage has been an interesting process, including plenty of marked-up changes on two full prints plus a further read through on a Kindle that was really helpful for picking things up I'd missed. The net result is only a couple of hundred words longer but a lot more readable and coherent.

The process also threw up sufficient notes and queries to create a second novel, I think (possibly a third but I'm allergic to trilogies).

*

I've had a vague notion for a Star Wars story floating around for a while and, on a whim, I downloaded three of the best reviewed of the existing novels to get an idea for structure, tone, quality etc. I'm not impressed; I mean, I wasn't expecting Pynchon but I was surprised by how functional and basic the first has been so far. It's straight surface narrative with no depth, each (short) chapter a scene, and by a writer from whom I expected better. It reads like the novelisation of an outline of a rejected screenplay.

You know nothing.

Over on my main blog I reacted to a lot of the criticism that has been levelled at the final season of Game of Thrones (which, cards on table, I thought was excellent). A lot of the criticism is devoted to supposed technical faults in the writing. A lot of that criticism seems to me to be plain wrong.

Of course, a popular blockbusting TV show may feel constrained to adhere to certain principles and tropes, but equally it may not, even if it doesn't go full David Lynch. For Game of Thrones, in which we know the source author George RR Martin is fond of undercutting and subverting tropes, it is doubly dangerous to assume that just because you don't like something it is the result of 'bad writing'. In the case, for example, of Daenarys Targarien, you may have been expertly played along for the full series.

I'm still working this through, so the below is somewhat provisional, but broadly speaking:

1.  Characters do not require a 'fully realised character arc.' People in real life are born, die, and do the best they can in between. The same can be true for characters in fiction.
2. There is no requirement on a writer to take everything that happens in a narrative and tie it all up into a neat bow at the end. Again, that's not how the world works and there is no reason it should be how fiction works either.
3. 'Character Development' is not limited to the Hero's Journey template. A character does not have to change to be developed, it is enough that we find out more about them, their depths and shallows.
4. The writer is under no obligation to deliver resolution to the reader, and may choose deliberately to withhold it.
5. There need not be any causal link between character actions and story outcomes. In a multi-character narrative over an extended time period things happen that are told as part of the story but have no impact on how things end at all.
6. Not everything leads to a 'payoff'. Acts of individual heroism or cowardice may be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 'Did [insert name of character] die for this?' is a dumb question. 
7. A putative hero may travail to overcome obstacles in pursuit of their quest and fail in the attempt. The failure may be because of some aspect of their own character.
8. The bad guys may also overcome obstacles in pursuit of their quest and succeed.
9. In court cases, the opposing sides seek to establish 'facts' as part of a narrative to establish various propositions to be true or false (or irrelevant). A similar process can be observed in fiction, an attempt to impose some sort of narrative order on events and behaviours. But the constructed narrative may be true, false, irrelevant, misleading or untrustworthy. 

More as I think about it. Maybe.