28 December 2013

Revisiting old stories can be very strange. I’m reworking a couple of old stories for upcoming competitions, and they seem to be fitting very well. The startling thing is that I’m only now really discovering what the stories are about. Not what happens in them, not the plot – that hasn’t changed, not really – but what the actual theme is, what the story means, potentially, to anyone who reads them. And these stories are both about a year old.

In the case of one of them, it’s been a very pleasing revelation, because I was always aware that I didn’t actually know what the story was about. I mean, it was a good story, it pottered along from beginning to end, it got the job done. And it got good feedback; people seemed to like it. But me (and, crucially, my inner editor)? I wasn’t quite satisfied. Obviously, I was being a bit more harsh on it than many of my readers were, but I tended to be left with a sense of ‘yes, very nice, but so what? What’s changed?’

Actually, lots of things had changed in what was a relatively short story (under 2,000 words), but I wasn’t convinced that my characters had learned all that much, that they themselves had been altered by events. And I wasn’t quite sure how to solve it. In the end (or at least, the original end), I decided to use my lack of certainty as a writer as a plot point: the characters themselves voiced a lack of certainty about how things were going to turn out. Now, if that sounds to you like something of a cop-out, I’d be the first to agree with you. But it seemed that most of my audience were perfectly happy by my cheat, finding it pleasingly ambiguous. Of course, sometimes the writer should shut up and quit while they’re ahead, but I was never quite satisfied. Then this competition turned up which appeared to be tailor made (with a couple of alterations) for this story, and I knew that I needed to make the ending neater. I just didn’t quite know how.

I’ve argued before (here, probably) that whenever I’ve had a problem that I couldn’t solve in my writing (or directing, or indeed in most any type of story telling), that I have already written the solution in an earlier part of the story: that plot point B has to happen, because I’ve already written plot point A, and they beautifully support each other. Such a shonky mantra, and yet it’s never let me down. I thought I might fail on this one, however. I had no idea how the two central characters could resolve their issues. There was too much difficulty to overcome, and roughly 80 words to do it in. And, it seemed, nothing that I’d already written in the first thousand words was giving me an exit plan.

And then I spotted it. I had the reveal: and I’d hidden it in the God-damned title. In the title. As if I’d always planned it that way, and that I’d named the story after I’d worked out the resolve. And while the rest of the story didn’t exactly write itself (I had to get involved a bit), it further strengthened my belief that a lot of stories are not so much created, as discovered, buried things that already exist, waiting for us to use the correct tools.  

Thursday 22nd August 2013

As a writer, you’re not really meant to go on too much about whatever it is that you’re working on at the moment. There are many reasons for this, the most compelling being that if you’re talking about the writing, then you’re not getting on with the actual business of doing the writing. It’s a form of procrastination: if you can talk about how fantastic the finished product is going to be, it (deceptively) lets you off the hook of actually putting in the work of putting one word after the other on a page. What you talk about will always be better than the dull, flabby story that you finally produce. There’s also the fact that you’re likely to dilute the story. Speak it out loud enough times – and all stories, at their source, come from the oral tradition (oh, stop sniggering at the back) – and the written version becomes a pale tracing.

There is, of course, yet another reason to shut up about your writing, and it’s probably the most simple. Unless you’re already published, unless people are prepared to fork out twenty quid at a book festival and ask some variation of ‘where do you get your ideas’, then, frankly, nobody gives a damn about that thing you’re probably never going to finish. Oh, sure, some of your loved ones will, and the couple of people who earnestly believe that you actually do have some talent – but even those people would rather you shut the hell up, and get on with the writing.

Back when I lived in Croydon, I remember attending a house party, although I don’t clearly remember anyone there, suggesting that the party was of a friend-of-a-friend. Therefore, I found myself wandering aimlessly through the various rooms. I do have one very clear memory of the party, however, and it’s of a writer talking – rather tediously – about this book he was working on. I remember thinking, even then, that this book would never be finished. The woman he was talking to also seemed to have reached this conclusion. He was speaking about how he got his ideas, making him reasonably unique in all of authors in that he actually had an answer to this question, even though it was likely that nobody had asked him it.

He’d written some kind of sci-fi book, which to my eavesdropping ears sounded somewhat like a EE Doc Smith kind of book. He was speaking about how he’d come up with the name for his hero. ‘You know the housing estate by the ABC cinema?’, he asked. It’s genuinely likely that you – yes, you, the one that’s reading this blog – do in fact know what housing estate he was talking about, since it’s the one that Jeremy and Mark live in, in the series Peep Show, and appears in some form in almost every episode. The name of the housing estate was (and may well still be) Zodiac Court. For as long as anyone could remember, however, the ‘O’ in court was missing. And therefore, our writer friend declared in revelatory tones that one normally reserves for penicillin being discovered growing on your lab table, wouldn't it be a great thing if those two words were reversed, and - ? Well, the rest is history. Uh, literally history, it seems, as a perfunctory Google search suggests that that character has not yet reached any kind of saturation point.

As I’ve indicated, though, I felt even then (and I wasn’t particularly doing any regular writing at that point) that his talking about his ideas in such a way seemed to pretty much guarantee  that he’d never finish the book. I’m not a big fan of Family Guy, but I’m fond of the repeated gag where the would-be intellectual Brian is constantly mocked: ‘you’ve been talking about that novel for three years now. How’s that going, anyway?’ Most of us probably know of a writer (read: not actually a writer) like this. I’m very aware of that trap.

However, that hasn't stopped me banging on about my writing on various networking sites. I know it can be tedious and boring to read/hear, and that it can be an excuse – as I’ve mentioned earlier – to not actually put the spadework in. I do it, however, for the same reason, I suspect, most writers do: partially for the affirmation, to get friends and other writers to show interest and support – to cheer me over the finish line – and also (the theory goes), if the declarations of a story are in such a public forum, then the idea is that I’ll be too embarrassed to do anything else but actually finish. However, I’m acutely aware that many other writers do this, and never finish (or even start) the stories that they’re wittering on about.  After all, writers have no excuse not to write, no matter how tired and emotionally drained at the end of a work day they are (which is normally, literally my excuse). The only thing to do is to sit down and write.

I feel a little more relaxed about banging on about what I’m writing (or so I tell myself) because the bulk of what I’m talking about is, for the most part, actually finished, done, completed. In the case of one play, it’s already had a full cast production. What I’m going on about now is the re-writes, the final draft. A few more of those well-wishers are now more vocal about wanting to actually read something I’ve written at some point. And, at some point, I’m going to have to take a deep breath, and let that happen. After all, why the hell else does anyone write?