Category Archives: On writing

Turning pro in a creative enterprise

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I write only when inspiration strikes; fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.

So said Somerset Maugham when asked if he wrote on schedule or only when inspiration struck. It is quoted in the book by Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, subtitled “How to break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles”.

The book is not a great one. It’s light and the content feels re-heated. And using a war metaphor is as tiresome and melodramatic as it is in all contexts other than war.

There are some useful distinctions, however. One is the distinction between the amateur and the professional.

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Blogging every day: Done!

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Done. Done. Done. Two weeks of posting to this blog every week day. I declared to a friend that I would, and I have.

I didn’t plan it in advance or choose a particular period. It was just a standard two weeks. I was certainly less busy at work than I have been recently, but much busier socially.

And I didn’t write any posts in advance; just one a day.

Here’s what I discovered.

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“I felt a funeral in my brain …”

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It’s a great line, isn’t it? “I felt a funeral in my brain ..”  Emily Dickinson could really write an opening line of power and strangeness. She is to the poetry world what Tolstoy (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”); and Daphne du Maurier (“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”) are to prose.

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inkpop pops for aspiring authors

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Want to get your writing reviewed by a professional editor?

Want to discuss the review with the editor?

Then head over to the luscious new inkpop, brainchild of HarperCollins Publisher. inkpop specialises in young adult fiction for readers and future authors.

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An experiment

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This blogging thing often gets me down. The lack of readers on some days, the lack of comments on most, hurts.

Actually, it’s the comparison that hurts. Seeing others get readers and comments with what looks like little effort, and to my jealous yellow eyes, little wit.

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The idea of fun: Quotes from October

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There’s a story about the work habits of the writer, Kingsley Amis, told by his son, Martin.  Each morning he would go into his study and for the next few hours all the family would hear would be the sound of laughter from behind the closed door.  To the boy outside, the boy who would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to emulate his father’s success, it must have hurt dreadfully listening to his father having fun without him.  No wonder he had all his teeth out in the 90s.

But it’s a different age now, and there’s a different type of Englishman abroad, one who, like Will Self, takes his fun in public, metaphorically running around Sainsbury’s in the nude, cackling and plotting, with an erection.

In fact, if you’ve ever want to know what writing for fun might look like, look no further than Self’s first novel, My Idea of Fun, which I started in October.  That Self’s idea of fun may not be yours is rather signalled by the opening couple of pages, surely the most obscene I’ve ever read.  It concerns necrophilia and not just any old necrophilia but necrophilia to the power of n(ecrophilia), as it were.  I like to imagine his publisher getting an eyeful of that little lot on opening Self’s email entitled, “First draft of my next.”  Blanch or what?

Will Self is fun gone monstrous.  His topics are so bizarre, his language so fecund, so motile – Julie Burchill blurbs about its “elegance and suppleness” but this is far too mild, probably the first and only time Burchill herself has known mildness – that reading anything else feels like standing still.  He’s spoiling me, corrupting me, for any other writer.

In this current novel, a young boy called Ian, growing up in his mother’s caravan park, is “apprenticed” to an insane megalomaniac with special powers of eidesis (from the Greek for image, a real, highly unusual ability, occasionally observed in children, of discerning and remembering visual images with perfect acuity) called The Fat Controller.

The bits I can communicate to you using the words of ordinary thought involve, amongst other things, penetrating people’s psyches at will, disappearing Ian’s acne with an incantation while rubbing in a semen-based mixture and murdering the woman who shushed him sitting in the next row of the theatre using a shot of curare dispensed from the hypodermic concealed in the ferrule of his cane.  Like Ian, a fledgling eidetiker, I’m battening down the hatches as we speak, sure in the knowledge that with The Fat Controller’s amour propre avenged, the fun’s only just started.

To give you a tiny, perforce, woefully inadequate taste of Self’s eerie ability, here’s an early scene, when The Fat Controller, or Mr Broadhurst as he is still known then, first arrives at the caravan park with two rough diamonds, two “gyppos”:

‘Do that, do that.  Do it now.’  His voice at first merely emphatic, gathered emotional force.  ‘Position the machine in the wings, so that the god may be ready to descend on a golden wire.’  The gyppos set down their mugs … and, addressing one another with glottal stops and palate-clickings, leapt back up into their truck.  Their black bushes of hair, their raven faces, the way they dressed in dark coats fastened at the waist with lengths of rope, the way they spoke and drank and moved, in short, everything underscored their moral insouciance.  ‘Do what we will,’ the gyppos seemed to say, ‘that is the whole of our law.’

But Mr Broadhurst … dared to order these Calibans about.  When he barked, they snapped to. ‘Mind out for my things,’ he shouted after them. ‘My impedimenta, my chattels, my tokens of mortal desire …”

And here he is on a psychologist called to examine Ian and his budding superpowers of imagery:

The blind swung their antennae heads in the general direction of this prodigy, training on me three pairs of clear-lensed glasses, behind which puffs of cotton wool were imprisoned, like some awful kind of oxidisation.

See this?  He makes cotton wool balls lyrical.  Fantastic!  Literally.

*****

Also in October, when I could tear myself away from the defilement of my soul being conducted by Mr Self (Will), I read an article by Roger Scruton in The New Atlantis entitled “Hiding Behind the Screen.”

Another Englishman — though of the grumpy-old-man-philosopher-who-writes-like-an-angel variety – he was trying to conceptualise the effect on human relations of the internet.  For which I give him points, especially as others in the field merely pontificate (“our brains are being rewired”) or re-label.

Scruton argues that human relations mediated by the screen are fundamentally different to other human relations because of the absence of risk.

For a start, I have my finger on the button; at any moment I can turn the image off, or click to arrive at some new encounter.  The other is free in his own space, but he is not really free in my space, over which I am the ultimate arbiter.

He goes on,

I enjoy a power over the other person of which he himself is not really aware – since he is not aware of how much I wish to retain him in the space before me.  And the power I have over him he has too over me … He, too, therefore, will not risk himself … There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.

Scruton contrasts this with Hegel’s idea about human freedom, an idea that has been of “enduring importance” and which appears in all kinds of guises and settings, most notably in the “writings of psychologists concerned with mapping the contours of ordinary happiness”:

Hegel’s crucial claim is that the life of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others.  I become fully myself only in contexts which compel me to recognise that I am another in others’ eyes.  I do not acquire my freedom and individuality and then, as it were, try them out in the world of human relations.  It is only by entering that world, with its risks, conflicts, and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled person among persons.

If we only realise ourselves in the context of the other – the other’s freedom, the other’s sovereignty, and our necessary negotiation of this otherness – or, as he puts it, borrowing from Marx, in “going out”, in every sense of the term, to meet the other, how attenuated our opportunities for self-realisation are becoming as we increasingly live behind the screen.

*****

The Masterette

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Wandered, this week, into the bizarre world of Will Self and who should I find there but my unhero, Henry James. Self’s book, Cock and Bull — subtitled Cock: A Novelette, Bull: A Farce — is Kafka with a dash of Nabokov, diluted with the Holloway Road, London N7.

The blurbs alone are worth the price of entry:

Imagine a film of Kafka’s Metamorphosis scripted by William Burroughs and shot by David Cronenberg … pure delight to verbal perverts everywhere. ~ Sunday Times

Now I like my Kafka, as with my Chekhov, in small doses.  The reason may be ostensibly different in each case but I suspect it boils down to the same thing. I can’t take too much reality. So while mention of Kafka gave me pause, the next blurb carried all before it:

Mordant, acute … exquisitely cunning … the funniest book about late onset hermaphroditism you’ll read all year.
~ The Independent

Only an English newspaper would attempt that.

So I entered and it was a grotesque world indeed, and in it there was Henry, palely loitering:

Henry James only had half a cock. Not a lot of people know that.  The poor man lost it chasing after a fire engine, trying to help out as an amateur fire fighter in his native Boston.  He tripped and fell beneath the horses’ hooves, only to emerge white and half unmanned.  They carried him home to his exceptional family on a board.  His brother William looked at poor Henry.  He focused on the bloody patch that coated Henry’s breeches, and challenged God … to make his brother whole again.  He was praying for all of us you see, he knew his brother. He knew that all we could look forward to was a series of thick, turgid novels; penis substitutes. Since poor Henters couldn’t fuck anybody else, he resolved to fuck us all up with his serpentine sentences …

*****

Those with keen eyes or nose (yes, dear Jenny) may have noticed Elif Batuman’s Kafka porn competition, leftovers from a long piece she wrote on Kafka for either the London Review of Books or The New York Times, which she illustrated with a reproduction of an Aubrey Beardsley print showing a baby being born from a man’s calf.

I’d say Will Self has seen that print too. Probably in the V&A.

So often it feels like the great Internet only makes visible what’s always been: the spider’s web of ideas and influences.

*****

Image: Will Self, courtesy of The Guardian

The novel in 11 days

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The contrast between Nabokov and Georges Simenon as novelists is about as great as it can get, short of caricature.  Nabokov and Hemingway, for example, would be caricature.  Possibly, Hemingway and Hemingway is caricature.

Nabokov and Simenon, however, are still within coo-ee of each other, though their results and methods were very different, as was their congeniality as interview subjects.  In his interview with The Paris Review in 1967 Nabokov is the nightmare subject – arch, facetious, overweening — Simenon, on the other hand, is forthcoming and transparent.

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) is most famous for the Inspector Maigret detective novels, novels he churned out by the dozen.  What’s less well-known about Simenon — at least until the recent reawakening of interest led by the writer, John Banville, and the New York Review Books republication of some of his oeuvre — is that he also wrote many “serious” novels which are virtuoso lessons in that magical ingredient of any artwork: atmosphere.

What he says about atmosphere in The Paris Review interview is fascinating.  He reveals it is central to his very method.  What’s also fascinating is that he cheerfully volunteers exact details about this method, a method that resulted in 550 million copies of his work being in print today. (1)

*****

At any time, Simenon says, he has two or three themes in his mind.  They’re not things that “might serve for a novel”, rather, “they are things about which I worry.”  Two days before the writing is to begin – intriguing, this precision — a couple of things happen.  First, he “finds” some atmosphere.

Today there is a little sunshine here. I might remember such-and-such a spring, maybe in some small Italian town, or some place in the French provinces or in Arizona … and then, little by little, a small world will come into my mind, with a few characters.

Second, he consciously takes up one of the “themes” that has been circulating in his mind, and then this theme or idea “will come and stick around [the characters]”:

They will have the same problem I have in my mind myself.  And the problem – with those people – will give me the novel.

Immediately after — “because as soon as I have the beginning I can’t bear it very long” – Simenon would take an envelope, a telephone book and a town map.  On the envelope he’d put the names of the characters, their ages, their families; the telephone book he’d mine for names; and with the map, he’d “see exactly where things happen.”  Then two days later, in every case, he’d begin writing.

Not only is he precise about the interval before starting, the whole production runs to a suicidal timetable.

After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day.  Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel.  If, for example, I am ill for forty-eight hours, I have to throw away the previous chapters.  And I never return to that novel.

At the end of 11 days – the limit of his endurance – he’d have his book.

This was the method by which Simenon created scores and scores of novels, both the Inspector Maigrets, and the serious novels, the two forms of writing he calls his “non-commercial” writing.  His “commercial writing”, a thing of the past by this stage in his life, were the “stories for magazines and things of that kind” that he wrote to earn his living in the beginning.

Simenon is particularly interesting when he distinguishes between the non-commercial and the commercial writing.  In fact, he makes the same distinction between the two I was groping towards in distinguishing between writing and blogging, and he makes it on similar grounds.

For him, commercial work – “I didn’t call it writing” – is that which is done “for such-and-such a public or for a certain kind of publication or for a particular collection.”  Commercial works can be very poor or very good, even wonderful,

but very seldom can they be works of art, because a work of art can’t be done for the purpose of pleasing a certain group of readers.

And when the interviewer asks in what way would this show up, Simenon answers pithily,

in the concessions.

The interviewer asks, “To the idea that life is orderly and sweet, for example?”

But Simenon is too toughminded for such pussyfooting.  He answers:

And the view of morals.  Maybe that is the most important.  You can’t write anything commercial without accepting some code.  There is always a code …

Funny how this business of writing always comes back to morality.  It was the very first question Nabokov was asked, and here it is again, raised this time by the interviewee.

*****

Simenon was blessed in his interviewer, a man called Carvel Collins.  Unlike Nabokov’s all-too-evident Gold, Collins is not obsequious or obstrusive.  In fact, one of the most satisfying things about the interview is a non-question, a question that wasn’t asked: Mr Simenon: what drives your faintly pathological work rate?

In asking it, Collins would have received an answer trimmed to fit an answer-like space.  In not asking it, he elicits a stimulating picture of a man engaged on a grand and never-ending journey of problem-solving and “problem-finding”, as Richard Sennett, the sociologist, so happily describes the general practice of craft.

It’s an image, this “craftsman” one, that Simenon would own with gladness:

I am an artisan; I need to work with my hands.  I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.  My characters – I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional.  And I would like to make a man so that everybody, looking at him, would find his own problems in this man.

*****

Notes

1. Wikipedia

Images: Simenon, courtesy of Wikipedia (top)

A thunderous “stet!”

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There’s a Korean saying about life: “Life is ten thousand joys, and ten thousand sorrows”.  If there were a saying about the internet it would be similar.  The internet is a squillion marvels, and a squillion … disappointments, I think would be the right term.

One marvel is The Paris Review’s interviews of famous writers going back to the 1950s.  The interview can be a poor substitute for the portrait, but if one has to make do with interviews these are among the best.

There is so much to delight.  What the subjects give away and what they withhold, the competence and incompetence of the interviewers – see the cringe-making introduction written by Graham Greene’s interviewers; Greene, eternally sardonic, the man with a “chip of ice in his heart”, must have been laughing up his sleeve – and the sport there is to be had in comparing subjects.

One such sportive event is to read side by side the interviews of my beloved and very naughty, Vladimir Nabokov, and the generous Georges Simenon, two authors on opposite ends of the spectrum of baroqueness; Nabokov with his tropical phantasmagorias, Simenon, who for every day spent writing, spent two cutting – “adjectives, adverbs and every word which is there just to make an effect.”

***

The Nabokov interview in The Paris Review is famous for his exhilarating diatribe on the concept of poshlost which Wikipedia translates as “self-satisfied inferiority”.  The diatribe is amusing and so characteristic of the chief Nabokov traits – the rapture, the drollery, the elaboration upon elaboration, the cattiness (“And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range”) – it forms a mini-portrait in itself.

Yet it’s worth reading the whole interview, primarily because Nabokov acquits himself so poorly.  Which is exactly as he would have wanted.  “As an interview subject, Mr Gold, you’ll see I make a very good writer”, he seems to be saying to the unfortunate Herbert Gold, dead meat surely from the moment he asks – his very first question! – about Nabokov’s “sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita”.

Now I can hear Nabokov’s “Dunderhead!” from here, 43 years in the future. What an idiot is this Gold!

I’m only a loving reader, not a scholar or even a would-be conscientious interviewer, but I know Nabokov doesn’t care a fig about morality.  Nabokov’s not concerned with morality and I know this not because Lolita is the story, amongst other things, of a paedophile, but because morality is always a matter of bad taste and Nabokov is, above all, the connoisseur of taste, the “tutor”, as James Wood calls him, “in exquisiteness”. And what is poshlost – the matter which most exercised him in the interview – if not the absence, the ceding of taste?

In the event, Nabokov’s response to Gold’s inane question is remarkably mild, the only time he’s mild in the entire interview.  Again, it’s as if he’s saying to Gold, “there’s no way you’re ever going to get a handle on me … you can ask something as stupid, as poshlost-y as that, and I’m not going to bite.”

In fact, he seems intent on making Gold another “galley slave”:

Interviewer: E M Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels.  Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

Nabokov: My knowledge of Mr Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it is not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although … one sympathises with his people if they try to wiggle out of that trip to India … My characters are galley slaves.

He is just as caustic, naturally, on the subjects of critics and editors.

The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read.  Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.

The “… or has not read” is devastating, and the laughs for being delayed, all the more deadly.

On the subject of editors – “I suppose you mean proofreader” – the reader can hear him winding up a notch in extravagance as if he’s become bored with pedestrian insults:

Among these [“proofreaders”] I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honour … But I have come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”

No, on the whole, despite his hamfistedness, I pity Mr Gold.  From the very first click of the heels – “Interviewer: Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions. Nabokov: Good morning. I am ready.” – Nabokov is the nightmare subject: petulant, confected, and like his chess player protagonists, unremittingly calculating and defensive.

Only once does Gold come close to penetrating the veneer:

Interviewer: Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?

It’s a good question finally – that “secret flaw” hooks — and Nabokov knows it because it’s the only time he approaches seriousness:

Nabokov: The absence of a natural vocabulary … Of the two instruments in my possession, one – my native tongue – I can no longer use … My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop …

The shortest road?  And all this time I thought he was aiming for the scenic route!  Possibly he’s smuggled in a laugh after all.

***

In contrast to Nabokov, Georges Simenon as an interview subject makes a very good interview subject.  He’s straight, open and generous.  As a writer, Simenon is interesting for the fact he was so prolific – he wrote nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas and many other works of autobiography and pulp fiction; about “550 million copies of his works have been published” (1) – and for his so-called “psychological” novels which are masterpieces of atmosphere.

More to come …

***

Notes:

1. Wikipedia

Images: Scott Hansen at ISO50

The writer’s necessary (2)

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One of the things it takes to be a writer is courage.  Another is a whip and a shrug; the whip for getting the lions of ambiguity – seven of them, according to William Empson’s famous taxonomy – up on their stools; the shrug for when it doesn’t go according to plan.

To raise another creature’s name for a minute, one far more feared and entirely loathsome, it was Jacques Derrida who saw the need for the shrug.  Fitting for a Frenchman.

Derrida believed no matter how assiduously the writer cracked her whip to control the lions of ambiguity, there would always be one looking in the wrong direction or snarling when it should be sleeping.  The writer may do everything possible to control the text and screw down meaning, but something will always escape.  Some remnant, some “supplement” as he called it, would get away from the writer, and Derrida spent his career sniffing out these signs in the margins of a text, an occupation which became known as deconstruction, or more kindly, close reading.

Take a tiny example from this blog.

Check out the post about the little girl, Benazir, who died in the Pakistan floods.  The photograph accompanying the post shows a man in the raging waters, his arm raised to call for help.  Then look at the very next post about an entirely unrelated subject – courage in writing – and you can see I unconsciously chose a photograph from Rossellini’s film, Rome, Open City which again features a person raising their arm to call for help.  It’s only now looking back I can see that one post leaked into the next.  This leakage is exactly what Derrida had in mind, and demonstrates how it is that a writer is never wholly in charge of her material.

The 7 types of ambiguity

William Empson (1906-1984), a literary critic and poet, defined ambiguity as occurring when “alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading”.

He identified seven types of ambiguity:

  1. The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
  2. Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
  3. Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.
  4. Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.
  5. When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.
  6. When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.
  7. Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author’s mind. (1)

Empson’s taxonomy was designed originally for poetry, and looking at it now you may see some holes or disagree with some groupings.  But the interesting thing about it is how he makes explicit the writer’s imperfect control, particularly in types 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Number 5 is also interesting.  It’s the one at play in the situation I’ve referred to, with the help of W G Sebald, as “getting hold of the wrong thread.”  If the writer writes to discover what she thinks about a situation, then it’s her task to try to stay ahead of the curve, not following along in its wake.  Or be truly masterful and severe in the re-writing.

Numbers 2, 3 and 4 all pose a constant question to the writer.  As the writer writes, at each step of the way, there is a decision — do I make each meaning explicit (at least, each meaning I identify), or do I leave them conjoined?  Do I hunt down and (try to) kill every ambiguity, or do I leave it to the reader to assimilate it?  Each step, each word, calls on the writer to make a decision about ambiguity, about the amount of “work” the reader is called on to do.

The boring and the baroque

Perhaps you think there’s no question.  Perhaps you think “death to ambiguity” and all who ride in her.  Yet consider just two of the possible end points of such a view.  One is boredom, as noted by Voltaire:

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Another is the baroque, the style of writing which “deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities”, as defined by Borges.  Borges may have been happy to make a point of the baroque, but it’s an acquired taste, and becoming more so with each passing day.

What it takes to be a writer is to be at home in ambiguity:  to identify it when you can, to let it be when it’s called for, to minimise it when that’s called for.  And to understand above all that some meaning will always escape, and that a shrug, the more Gallic the better, comes in handy.

*****

Notes

1. Empson’s 7 types from Wikipedia

Images: Jacques Derrida smouldering beautifully, courtesy of Just Rhetoric (top); William Empson, courtesy of The University of Sheffield (bottom)