Writing that inspires

Things have been a bit quiet here lately. I’ve been investing all of my blogging time in 26 Treasures of Childhood, part of a project I’m working on with the Victoria & Albert Museum.

But it’s a public holiday here in England today, so I have a little bit of spare time. Here’s a short video of the brilliant Etgar Keret reading a story from his new collection, Suddenly, A Knock at the Door (thanks to Dan Powell for the video link).

I’m just about to buy the Keret book on Amazon and here are two others that I’ll be slipping into my shopping trolley, new collections from writers Nik Perring and Tania Hershman. I’ve bought their books in the past and really enjoyed them. Best of all, like Keret’s work, it’s the kind of writing that inspires me to write.

Tania’s book has got its own trailer…..

The joy of knowing positive people

A good blog post is supposed to have a clear focus, a single point. But I’d just like to ramble on for a bit about what a wonderful week I’ve had.

On Wednesday, I was off to the Museum of Childhood in London to help kick start an exciting new writing project, 26 Treasures of Childhood. On Thursday, I built and wrote the blog to explain what that project is all about. On Saturday, I was down in Whitstable for an excellent writing workshop with Vanessa Gebbie, who I’ve read and admired for a long time, but not met. And today I’ve dug my vegetable patch, cooked lunch and read a stunning short story in the sunshine.

In between the gaps I’ve talked to people about some great projects, including running a festival of words and organising some kind of street literature experience.

Best of all, I’ve met and worked with some wonderful people. I’m thinking particularly about Rhian Harris and Stephen Nicholls from the Museum of Childhood; my inspirational colleagues on that project – John SimmonsFiona Thompson and Emily Bromfield; Malcolm Blythe; the Wordstock gang (Sara Sheridan, Elen Lewis, Elise Valmorbida); and the Whitstable writers, especially Peggy Riley, who gave me the honour of letting me scribble for a while inside her beautiful writing shed.

Other parts of my life have been giving me a bit of grief this week, so on this lovely sunny afternoon I’m going to focus my thoughts on the joy of knowing and working with some very special, positive, creative, generous, friendly people who make good things happen in the world.

And I’ll especially savour the fact that Vanessa Gebbie said I was “brilliant”, Sarah Salway said she’d like to work with me one day and John Simmons said I’d “made something beautiful”.

And there concludes my love-in.

Writer, grow a beard

Every writer should grow a beard (females excluded, I suppose). That is what I conclude from a seven-month journey into the world of facial hair.

I stopped shaving at a music festival last August. My Dad grew a beard when he was my age, as did my father-in-law. I’d always felt I’d try it one day – a field of dancing campers seemed the ideal place to begin.

Yesterday, I decided to bring the experiment to a close. I fished out my razor this morning, lathered up, and off went the stubble.

Writers are always told to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. A beard does the job remarkably well. Your most distinctive feature – your face – becomes unrecognisable.

The process occurs over a few weeks when growing the beard. But when you shave it off the change takes place in seconds. It’s quite a shock. I feel pink and fleshy. My chin looks enormous. I don’t recognise myself.

I messaged a photo to my wife. “You look very strange!” she replied.

I feel very strange.

Imagine being able to achieve that with words.

How to be a successful writer (and how to fail)

I went for a haircut yesterday. I seem to have arrived at the point in life where I have a Stylist. I’m not sure if that is a consequence of age or income. Her name is Louise. She likes the fact that I’m a writer and a “creative”; it’s what we talk about as she snips away. Yesterday we discussed artistic failure.
I told her how I always find writing difficult, even though I’ve been at it for 20 years. Writing fiction is particularly hard, I said. I invest so much time in work that I usually regard as a failure.
It’s not that I’m too harsh on myself, I explained. I like some of my stories. Some of them I like a lot. But the problem is, they never turn out how I want them to. I might look on them kindly, but I always see their flaws, their potential for improvement.
Not my Stylist; it’s Tara Fitzgerald
“It’s the artistic temperament,” Louise said, snipping away. “Never satisfied.”
It could be that, or it could just be that I was having a grumpy day. But I thought about her words again when I read an interview with actress Tara Fitzgerald in the Guardian this morning. Asked, “What does success mean to you?” she replied:
“If you measure success by money, then your achievements are easy to calculate. But if you’re a creative person and you measure your achievements by how you feel about yourself, I can’t believe you ever feel successful. I just don’t think the artistic temperament allows it.”
So maybe Louise was right.
Writing about it now, I’m reminded of what Twyla Tharp says in her book, “The Creative Habit“. Every creative person has to deal with failure, she argues, because failure is inescapable.
Tharp isn’t one to romanticise failure, but she provides a whole chapter on its benefits. “Believe me,” she says, “success is preferable to failure. But there is a therapeutic power to failure. It cleanses.”
She then lists six ways a creative person can fail:
Failure of skill. You have an idea in mind, but not the skills to pull it off. “This is the cruellest, crudest, most predictable form of failure,” says Tharp. How do you fix it? Work harder, get the skills you need, she advises.
Failure of concept. You have a bad idea. You keep banging away at it, hoping you can make it work, but you never will. Nobody could. Solution: “Get out while the going’s good,” says Tharp.
Failure of judgement. You leave something in that you should have taken out, maybe because you ignored your gut feeling, suspended your judgement, tried to please – or not hurt – someone else. Solution: “Remember at all times that you’re the one who’ll be judged by the final product”.
Failure of nerve. This is the worst, she says. “You have everything going for you except the guts to support your idea and explore the concept fully.” Solution? “I wish I had a cure for this,” says Tharp.
Failure of repetition. Don’t cling to your past successes. “Constant reminders of the things that worked inhibit us from trying something bold and new”. Solution: follow you instincts and passions, wherever they might lead.
Failure of denial. A painful one. To protect yourself from the risk of being laughed at, ignored, or rejected, you pretend that the audience doesn’t matter. That can be useful, but it leads to failure if you refuse to fix problems on the grounds that nobody else will notice or care. “This is bad denial,” says Tharp. “You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.” Solution: she doesn’t suggest one.
I could list more – failure to focus, failure to finish, failure to even start – but I’d rather think about success for a while instead.

Learning how to write, all over again

Our household has gone a bit China mad lately. For the two youngest children, China is their school topic this term. They have been drawing dragons, writing about the artist Ai Weiwei, making kites, and such like.

I’ve been involved, too. Alongside its China topic, their primary school is trying to get its children more interested in reading stories set in other cultures, as a way of understanding how life is different elsewhere on our planet. To combine this with their China work, they commissioned me to write a “traditional” Chinese folk tale, which they would then use to spark ideas in school.
I accepted the challenge and became utterly engrossed, quite possibly obsessed – but in a good way. After scratching around for a while, I took a story-form rooted in Yugur culture and put my own spin on it. My tale is about Sheep – one day she leaves her flock to live a new life on Heavenly Mountain, where the grass is sweet and green. Along the way she meets Wolf, with whom she strikes a bargain.
The school liked the story and asked me if I’d come in and read it to an assembly of all the children. I agreed, unsure what they would make of it. I thought the older children might enjoy it, but I worried that the smallest ones – some of whom are barely five – wouldn’t get it at all.

I needn’t have worried. It went down well, especially the parts where I leapt around wielding a bamboo cane in the air – something you’re not really allowed to do in school these days.

After the reading, I took a workshop with some of the older boys, trying to get them to write their own creative responses to the story. This was hard going at first, but once they realised that they were allowed to make stuff up and have fun with words, they really got into the idea. There was a beautiful moment, about half and hour in, when they all had their heads down and were scribbling away and I really felt like I’d achieved something.

I’m not sure that I taught them to become better writers – I was only with them for a few hours. But I think I helped them to realise that they could generate ideas, and that their ideas were as good as anyone’s. I hope they can keep that thought with them.

In the afternoon, I went to read my story to the school’s youngest children. Concerned that the full story – and its themes of naivety, selfishness and redemption – might be too much for them to grasp, I had written a shorter version of about half the length, with the language simplified and the narrative complexities removed.

Sitting down to read this to them, I asked a few questions about what they’d made of the morning’s reading. I was amazed at how perceptive they were. Most of them had a good recall of the main plot points and characters; several of them could quote back sections of dialogue – well, almost.

I quickly realised that the “dumbed down” version of the story wasn’t needed. I should have had greater respect for this young audience. There’s a lesson for me there.

Amid all this creative activity, I’ve been writing about China for a client – or trying to. I’m supposed to be writing about how the global economic downturn is making it harder for Chinese companies to raise finance. It’s interesting, but I’m struggling to find my way into it – after the Christmas and New Year break, I’ve lost some of my rhythm. I want the words to flow effortlessly, but they won’t.

Really, I ought to remember what I told the boys in school: if you find it hard to write, just start; if you find you want to stop, keep going.

I had no idea what to write about when I opened the Scrivener file that became this blog post, just one word: China. Now I have 670 words. That’s how writing works sometimes – and it’s as true for me in my study as it is for those boys in their classroom.

Apple, Siri and Found Poems

I was reading today about the Siri app on iPhone 4s. Basically, you can ask your phone a question, or give it a task to do, and it will understand what you mean and respond. It recognises natural language instructions, and apparently does a rather good job of it.
Googling around for information about how it works, I found an official Apple list of some of the stock phrases that Siri can understand.
I feel there is a strange poetry in these questions and commands. They seem to say something about the always-connected lives we lead. So, with no editing from me, apart from deleting an “s” and shortening the titles, here are a few “poems” from Apple….
Friends
Where’s Jason?
Where is my sister?
Is my wife at home?
Where are all my friends?
Who is here?
Who is near me?
Reading
Read my new message
Read it again
Reply that’s great news
Tell him I’ll be there in 10 minutes
Call her
Reminders
Remind me to call mom
Remind me to call my mom when I get home
Remember to take an umbrella
Remind me take my medicine at 6am tomorrow
Remind me to pick up flowers when I leave here
“Friends” is my favourite, I think.

Rubbish writing makes a connection

I’ve spent a lot of time editing other people’s short stories this week. It’s not something I’ve done before and I’ve learnt a lot from the process.

I’m part of Throw Away Lines, an inspired project from 26, the organisation that celebrates creative business writing. Andy Hayes is the evil genius behind the venture. He’s a writer obsessed with scraps of paper that he finds on the streets of London, and he has quite a collection.

Each piece carries some scribbled words or, in one case, a drawing. Some are evocative – the first draft of a will. Others are banal – a random list of chocolate bars. The project: take 26 writers, give each of them one of Andy’s scraps, and tell them to use it as inspiration for a short story of 1500 words or less.

My job is to edit seven of the stories. This was a worrying prospect: what if someone sent me a real stinker? What would I do with it? Luckily, the quality has been incredibly high. I’ve been able to spend my time helping authors to improve stories that were good to start with.

A question I’ve asked some of them is: what are you trying to achieve with the story? Now, as a reader, that’s not a question you get to ask. The story is what it is; you like it or you don’t. You can’t ask the author to explain anything, they aren’t around. But as editor, I get an Access All Areas pass, a peek behind the scenes. I get to look at how the writer is trying to make a connection with me, the reader.

Exploring this “connection making” process has been fascinating. There have been stories I’ve loved, but for reasons the author didn’t intend. One piece involved a passionate affair, or so I thought. But that character imagined all of it, the author told me. Does that mean I misread the story, or that it failed? No. It just means the story is ambiguous, and that’s one reason it works so well. It allows different readings; readers can connect to it in different ways – in their own ways. That’s a good thing.

Efforts to pin down meaning, to control the way a piece of writing connects with the reader, are often futile. Every reader will make their own connection to the story, based on who they are, how they’ve lived, what kind of mood they’re in.

When I read the first of the published Throw Away Lines stories, Eating for Two, by John Simmons, I thought of a stone cottage on a windswept highland, a wood-burning stove, a roomful of sozzled writers. None of that is in the story, but I heard John read his first draft in that room, with those writers, when I was away on his Dark Angels writing course, in Scotland. Reading the story connected me to that evening.

The second story in the series, The Coming, by Linda Cracknell, reminded me of John’s fellow Dark Angels tutor, Jamie Jauncey, for the peculiar reason that it contains the line, “You’ll have had your tea?” In the same stone cottage, or maybe in London a fortnight before, I heard Jamie conclude an anecdote with those words, which he spoke in the voice of an inhospitable Scottish landlady. It connected me to the songs Jamie sang us after dinner most evenings.

Those two connections are mine alone. The authors of those stories couldn’t have known they would speak to me in this way. It might annoy them: you’ve missed the point entirely, they might say. But their writing allowed me these connections, and I enjoyed it all the more as a result.

I find it easier to write, and to make my writing available to readers, when I accept the fact that they will connect with it in their own ways, they will make of it what they will. For a story to work in the way I want it to, I will try to guide them down a particular path, but if I am behind them pushing and shoving at every corner, that’s when the writing fails.

I’m wondering what this tells me about my business writing. The corporate world is terrified of the unexpected connection, of leaving readers space to bring their own meaning. There must be a clear message, the conclusion of a logical argument. It’s as though every reader has the same tuning fork inside their head, and all we need to do is hit it hard enough. So meaning has to be nailed into place, with plain, unambiguous words. I know that’s what we need sometimes, perhaps most of the time, but surely not always?

Dark Angels: What I learned in Scotland

I’ve earned a living as a business writer for over twenty years and written fiction for almost eight. But throughout that time, a dividing wall has kept my “corporate” writing separate from my “creative” work. The former pays the bills, the latter nourishes the soul, and never the twain shall meet. That used to be my attitude.

 

Two years ago an event in my life put a crack in that wall. A depressed friend killed himself. His action was a reminder that life is precious and must not be wasted.  It made me reflect on my own trajectory. Was I being true to myself, leading an authentic life, making choices that I was proud of? Or was I denying an important part of who I wanted to be – not just a writer for money but a creative artist, a phrase I still type with trepidation?

I decided that the wall that kept my writing personas separate needed to go. It was built, I think, out of fear. But fear of what? Embarrassment? Failure? Was I worried that business clients who heard I wrote short stories might think I was some kind of oddball? Probably. And did I suspect fiction editors would take me less seriously if they thought I sold words by the yard? Yes. It’s not rational, but fears often aren’t.

Whatever my concerns were, I needn’t have worried. When I’ve let slip to business clients over the last year or so that I write fiction, they’ve always been impressed – if not with the results then at least with the ambition. And whenever I’ve discussed the difficulty of earning a writing income with my fiction friends, they’ve congratulated me on my commercial acumen. “Coming out” in this way has been good for me.

But it has remained a tentative process. Even as I’ve chipped away at that public wall, in my mind these two areas of writing activity – corporate and creative – have remained separate. They required different skills, had different objectives – they were ineffably apart.

Moniack Mohr

Now, I’m exaggerating a little for effect here. One reason why I’ve been successful as a business writer is that I do sometimes use the tricks of the fiction trade to help with the “day job”. I know that a sprinkling of personal anecdote here, a dash of metaphor there, can liven up the dullest corporate assignment. I know, too, that finding ways to “muck about” with words can make the work more enjoyable, and that when I’m enjoying myself I write better and faster. Most importantly, I know that when I dip into the fiction toolbox I produce writing that makes a better connection with readers – and that, of course, is what it’s all about.

The dividing wall has been a real one nonetheless, and the chinks I knocked out of it were only small. So at the start of the summer I decided to demolish it for good. My chosen wrecking ball was a course called Dark Angels, run by two writers whom I admire greatly: John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey.

I first heard about Dark Angels in, I think, 2004. John has written a book of the same name, which was published in that year. His book talks about the need to bring creativity into business writing. Not because it makes the chore of grinding out business copy more bearable for the writer, or because it makes their words more effective – although it achieves both.

No. The real benefit is that writers who try to be more creative often have to rebel against corporate jargon, marketing mumbo-jumbo and organisational double-speak. They have to change the way people think about the world of work. They have to insist on the value, the necessity, of writing that treats its readers as thinking, feeling human beings – not constituents of a stakeholder group or marketing category. They have to become rebels. I like rebels. I liked the idea of becoming one.

Chapter five, Recreation and Retreat, tells the story of how John and his colleague, Stuart Delves, held a week-long workshop at Totleigh Barton, in Devon, where they helped fifteen other writers to work in the spirit celebrated in the book. The workshop was also called Dark Angels; it sounded, to me, like a week in heaven. Seven years after reading about it, I finally decided to go.

The view from my window in Scotland

So what did I learn from my week in Scotland, at Moniack Mohr? I can get extraordinary amounts of work done if I turn off my Blackberry and shut down the WiFi. I can chant in Latin and find it enjoyable. I can drink vast quantities of whisky without getting a hangover, but only if it’s Aberlour a’Bunadh and has a dash of water. People are like books, you can’t judge them by their covers. Polyphonic harmony sounds lovely. Some people can’t bear listening to praise. You can learn a lot from crumbling a stone between your fingers. Bird-spotting guidebooks are strangely reductive. Beatles songs can be more musically complex than they seem. I am a better writer than I realised. Everyone is a better writer than they realise.

Did I get what I wanted from the course? Other participants said the experience had transformed them: “I’m not the person I was on Monday,” one reported. That didn’t happen to me; I was a little envious. I left for the airport feeling that I too had learned a deep lesson, but I wasn’t sure what is was yet.

The day after I got home, we drove down to Devon for a holiday, renting a house in the South Hams with another family, old friends. One morning we visited the famous craft centre at Dartington Hall. Outside, in a small wooden shed, a man in faded jeans and a grey t-shirt was giving a glass-blowing demonstration. I stopped to watch. He put the finishing touches to a small shot glass and then started to make another, talking to his small audience as he worked.

His name was Ian Hankey. He has worked with glass for twenty years, he explained. I noticed the parallel immediately: I have worked with words for the same length of time. “How long did it take to learn?” asked one of the spectators. “I’m still learning,” he said with a smile.

I meant to stop for a few minutes only, but I watched Ian work for an hour and a half. Listening to him talk about his craft was like looking into a mirror. He made a wine glass next, moulding, stretching and reheating the glass, always changing it, adjusting it. Like a writer working on a first draft, everything was provisional. He was controlling the glass, but allowing it to find its own flow, the shape it needed to be. He was never quite sure how the piece he was making would turn out, but that didn’t seem to worry him.

Ian Hankey at work

 

At one point the wine glass cracked. There was a palpable sense of tension. Ian was worried that an hour’s work was lost. But he found a way of rescuing it.

I peppered Ian with questions, as I am wont to do. Do you ever burn yourself, I asked? He laughed and pointed to several burns on his hands and on his arms. But these are all from cooking at home, he said. The kitchen is a dangerous place, anything could happen. But in the workshop, he is in command. There are no accidents.

Indeed, as Ian chatted to us and worked the glass, it became clear he had other senses at work. He just knew, at one point, that the furnace had become too hot. He could tell when the glass was about to break. Skill like this can only come from working with raw materials, from hours of practice and experimentation and failure; from trying to make something, understanding why it is going wrong, and working out how to fix it. This is what I do all day, but with words.

These are tacit skills, he believes, and they are hard to learn because they are hard to articulate. You can’t record them in any book of instructions. He teaches glass work to college students, but tacit skills can’t be taught in a classroom, he said. They can only be assimilated by working alongside an unforgiving taskmaster, an opportunity few young glassmakers have now that production has moved overseas. But that’s exactly how I started to write, I thought, hammering away at a knackered typewriter with a ball-breaking editor breathing down my neck – and that old editor’s industry, newspapers, is dying too.

As Ian worked there were sometimes bubbles, tool marks or other “flaws” in the glass. These can be removed, he said, but nowadays he leaves them be. They are evidence, he explained, that the piece has been made by hand – only an industrial factory produces perfect work. These human traces are not only testament to the provenance of a piece, they add to its quality: you never get bored of looking at something “flawed”, he said: it has individuality, it is unique.

And here I had another “ah ha!” moment. This, of course, is what I had been learning to do in Scotland: writing in a way that allowed for individuality, understanding how the “flaws” that the overseers of a writing factory might want to eliminate – those metaphors, memories and other traces of humanity – were actually what made a piece work, what gave it enduring appeal and fascination, what enabled it to connect with readers.

Listening to one man talk about his craft told me so much about my own. So I asked him the question that I had taken with me to Scotland: if you enjoy working with glass so much, and are so skilled and experienced, how can you be content making simple wineglasses? (I expressed it in more polite terms: which do you prefer making: functional objects or art pieces?)

Ian’s answer was a wise one. Expressing your creativity through glass is a wonderful thing to do, he said, but function also has its beauty. Producing a well-made, attractive, functional wineglass, and then making five the same so the customer can buy a set, is a very challenging and satisfying activity, he said. And I knew this to be true, because I’d just watch him do it.

The students Ian teaches at college can all make glass sculpture, he explained, but ask them to blow a simple Christmas bauble and they struggle. They don’t have the craft skills, the technique, to make anything that someone would actually pay to use, they can’t sustain themselves as working craftsmen. So if they want to have a life working with glass, they need to connect with both art and craft – the two are not separate. Likewise with me and my words. That is the lesson I learned with the Dark Angels.

A performance with a touch of menace

This week’s reading at the Komedia went well. “You had the audience in the palm of your hand,” one of the organisers said. That was reassuring, as I couldn’t tell how the audience was responding. The stage lighting was blinding; once up there I couldn’t see anything. Look at the stripe of intense light across my nose in the photo: I look like Adam Ant, or Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now. I had a stinking cold, too, as you can tell from the red eyes. There’s a bit of menace to this story, so maybe the fact I looked rather strange added to the effect.

I have photos of this reading because there were friends of mine in the audience. That was a first. It isn’t because my friends don’t want to come and see me do my thing. It’s because I’ve never invited them. That might seem like an odd strategy. Secretive, even. But I prefer reading to a room of people I don’t know, or who know me but only as a writer.

Maybe that will change now. My friends came along because they were invited – not by me, but by a mutual writing friend who was also reading. They really enjoyed themselves, and said I was excellent. So they are welcome back. I like to think I’d reach the same conclusion if they thought my story was rubbish.