Fear, Freedom and Banned Books Week)

Banned Books Week.

Celebrating the works of fiction and non-fiction that have drawn the ire of censors, Banned Books Week looks at a huge swathe of young adult titles as well as now recognised classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

It’s a pretty impressive though not particularly exclusive club.

The reasons for banning books are supposedly for sexually explicit content, cultural insensitivity, unsuitability for the cited age group, religious or political view points, violence, or offensive language.  But ultimately, beneath all the complaints, what we really see when a book is challenged – or even banned – for its content, is fear.

Fear of the ideas a book contains. Fear of the ideas that inspired it. Fear of the ideas it might inspire.

I believe fear plays a crucial role in our relationship with books, one writers and readers must all be aware of even on some subconscious level. There’s fear in the writing, and in the act of writing, and in choosing a book, and in the act of reading, and in reacting to reading.

FOR ONE WEEK ONLY: Read all the lascivious literature you desire! Wishing everyone a scandalous #BannedBooksWeek. pic.twitter.com/V1J9vcwu6k

— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) September 29, 2015

Engines. Wings. Windows. Wheels. Oxygen. Decompression. Bombs. Terrorism. Human error. Computer error. Impact.

It’s early morning. The sun is low but rising. The plane engines are a loud, featureless roar. I’m sitting in the window seat behind the left wing, counting off the myriad ways we could all die.

Engines. A fireball of burning fuel bursts through the seal of the doors. It melts the plastic of the table that a woman braces her head against.

Wings. The hydraulics have gone. We won't slow down.

Oxygen. We’re all sleepy, so slow and so sleepy as the tip of the plane noses downwards.

My brain on overdrive: echoes of stories reverberate in my head. German Airwings. The Hudson River. That writerly imagination  making the possibility of flying in peace impossible. Oh sure there are other things I find scary or threatening. But the horrors of flying are always the same; fear burning away as ferociously as the images.

As foolish as it feels when my chest squeezes tight in the journey from terminal to malodorous tincan, I've used that same fear to develop tension and terror in my writing.

How does my protagonist feel when she steps into her lover’s house, hears the wrong music playing, sees his shadow dance beneath his feet? How does my reader feel as they discover each new clue to his predicament? Do they hang, tremulous as my protagonist? Can they feel the cord draw tight as they realise something is about to happen and it’s going to be terrible?

I’ve turned my almost risible fear into something useable.

Yet some of my other fears do precisely the opposite. They’re detrimental in the extreme and some of them I don’t even notice. Why? Because it’s not the sort of fear that inspires nightmares.

Just the kind that stops me from writing.

Now I understand your raised eyebrows but I’m talking the niggle in your head when you put pen to paper and you decide hmmm maybe not to include that scene or not to write that chapter because you think someone won't like it or it might cause offence. I'm talking about burying the kernel of a great idea for a novel because you know high elves and gargoyles are less popular than the strappings of a conventional mystery. Or deciding to couch a controversial issue behind a listicle or avoid writing about a subject because you're worried about the repercussions.

The same sort of fear that makes eighteen year olds feel self-conscious about picking books out of the young adult section or the majority of young fantasy and sci-fi readers more circumspect as they grow older, moving from speculative to more acceptable genres.

 

It’s self-censorship curated by a general understanding of convention.

We do it all the time, from not putting up that facebook status to not telling that joke.

Of course, some conventions are there for a reason. You don't throw a gratuitous f-word into Babbity Rabbit. And you don't stick sixty pages of explicit sex into a novel like Harry Potter (especially when the fandom will do it for you). And if dealing with religious or political material, maybe a cursory proof read would be good to ensure you're at least representing a valid concern.

But freedom of expression and speech are two things we should not take for granted. Not when there are writers being publicly flogged for their words or even being killed for them.

As Salman Rushdie said, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

Stories have a special ability to allow divergence of thought, to challenge the everyday, to illuminate an issue and propose new answers. Books have exquisite power because of those stories. They address fear - react to and transform it. And not creepypasta stuff. What does Joyce do if not highlight the fears of his contemporaries? Or Junot Diaz in Drown? Or Irvine Welsh with well... everything? Sure obscenities abound in all the above, but it's fear that antagonises certain readers.

Plus, just because you don't like it doesn't make it 'bad'. Fiction you do not like is a route to books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. We need to be aware of our fears and the things that make us stutter over the things we want to say or pause before we pick up a book or silence us when we should speak. Until we're aware of our fear we cannot truly understand what we are afraid of.

I struggle with fear sometimes. There are blogs I've scrapped because of what people might think. But I can't think that way and write what I want to write. I'm trying not to shy away anymore.

I know freedom of speech is one of those dark and twisty super slippery slopes. There's a time and place for self-censorship - even a time and place where we wish people would use it (ie. She Who Shall Not Be Named) - but it should be a choice made out of taste not fear, belief not ignorance. So you don't enjoy Frankie Boyle, or loathe Karin Slaughter's attention to gore. Don't read or watch them. But similarly, try not to label and moralise it for other people.

Oscar Wilde said “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

And if that means we must accept Fifty Shades of Grey has every right to be on bookshelves, so be it.

The pink illustrations and the featured image are by the supremely talented Ambivalently Yours (check out the tumblr page for more kick ass feminism in pink). Thank you for letting me use them in this blog!

And for a great article on the importance of reading and libraries check out Neil Gaiman's keynote speech on Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,

SCRIBBLER

Editing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

You’ve finished writing a thing – it might be a short story, a collection of poetry, a first novel, a seventh novel, or a screenplay. You’re pretty proud of it and you think you’re ready for a third-party to enter the relationship. You look up the details of someone to help whip your draft into ship shape before sending to an agent or a self-publishing platform.

So you prep your manuscript for invasive surgery (I'm assuming you're pretty serious about this thing you've written).

You run a final spellcheck, biopsy for lumps and bumps in each page, give it one last lingering look, exchange a final caress, and send it on its way.

Your editor receives it with cheer. Here lies a new project, a new body of work to eviscerate and explore. They’ll forgive the weird typos, the little mistakes symptomatic of a text loved too well to be fully torn apart by their author. They’ll enjoy peeling apart the sentences, marking up the lines where you’ve mixed your tenses, untangling inconsistencies as they stitch the plot back together.

Editors will love you for making them feel like surgeons of style, diction, plot and story.* But there are a few things that will turn them into butchers. Things that they see all the time. Things more irksome than the Avocado Song.

Plot, What Plot?

It’s all very well to want to write a novel where nothing happens like Flaubert, or to explore the failures of convention like Scarlett Thomas in Our Tragic Universe, or to try and be terribly clever like 80% of Man Booker longlistees. But they’re not devoid of plot, not really. Even in these wildly unconventional (for their time) novels they don’t completely alienate the idea of plot. They’re smuggled in there, as Vonnegut said, even if they’re turned on their head.

The Mary Sue / Gary Stu

There’s this concept in online writing circles known as the Mary Sue. Originating in Star Trek fanfiction, the Mary Sue was an original female character (OFC) introduced to the cast only to become an instantaneous hit. She’s beautiful, she’s skilled in literally everything, she’s Kirk’s lover (or Spock’s or both), she’s everyone else’s best friend, and if anyone doesn’t like her, that person must automatically be the bad guy. She’s essentially perfect or if she has flaws, they’re only there to make her look cuter (such as clumsiness – yes Bella Swan I’m looking at you). The male version of this is the Gary Stu or Marty Stu (depending on if you prefer rhyme or alliteration) and it whittles a character down to being an ‘Author Avatar,’ a special snowflake whereby a writer looks to capture their idealised self and idealised life on paper. Result? It usually sucks.

Deceased Parents are the Best

Unhappy childhoods, or lives full of traumatic events, are pretty much a staple backstory trope for those tragic, troubled characters. Now this can be done well. It can be used brilliantly. I'm not saying every Dead Parent Origin Story should be edited out. But it can be a pile of pure wangst. How do you veer away from the latter? Don’t focus on it. Forget the histrionics. Let their actions speak for themselves. Use characterisation instead of backstory to inform your reader. The only person who needs all the details is you.

The Rogue Effect

As my buddies over on Nerd Cactus once pointed out so succinctly, Rogue is the most over-powered X-Man of all time. She starts off with this power, which is awesome but awful, only to become unbeatable as all the bits that stopped her from being an all-powerful genie are relegated to the ashes of comic books past. And why? Because of lazy writing. Rogue is the Deus Ex Machina for all things mutant. When the writers need an escape from an impossible situation, Rogue’s powers develop exponentially in order to play the plot equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Lazy. Boring. Don't do it. Rant over.

Pointless Extras

The devil is in the detail. #amediting with @OrendaBooks pic.twitter.com/CdaFYBBI38

— Matt Johnson (@Matt_Johnson_UK) December 12, 2015

From entire scenes of extraneous detail to named characters who float into your manuscript only to disappear forever two pages later, pointless extras will almost always be cut out like a canker. It might be a beautiful image or a character you have a whole story established for in your head. But if it’s adding nothing to the novel at hand, prepare for the editorial slice and dice.

Grand Larceny

These days you'd be silly not to accept that some very successful writing derives from the world of fanfiction. Most editors aren’t too concerned about this. After all, it’s far from new. Alexander Pope essentially created an AU for the Latin poets and ancient gods. The Latin poets pretty much pilfered their best ideas from the Greeks. It’s all one ever-rolling stone when it comes to story and ideas and plots and characters. On the other hand, if your whole novel is a thinly veiled rewrite of Harry Potter, you might want to reconsider sending it to anyone. Just because you turned the Killing Curse blue and Harry’s hair blond, doesn’t mean editors won’t roll their eyes and ding your manuscript. Make something your own, however, and you might just end up as the next Cassandra Clare.

Trauma Patients

If editors can be said to be surgeons, it is important to note they are not trauma surgeons. They’re the general surgeons, the cardio-gods, the neuro-experts, with specialities specific to their skillset. If your novel is a raw, open, bleeding first draft and you think it’s ready for third-party insight, think again. When you’ve typed those last few words onto the page, breathed in the pride of having finished, put that manuscript into the ICU – reread it, rewrite it, edit it yourself before you fob it off on someone to try to resuscitate. Don't rush, we'll be waiting for when you need us.

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 

SCRIBBLER

* This has nothing to do with being paid to read books of course.

Of Dos and Don'ts (Because Writing Rules Suck)

Of Dos and Don'ts 

Because Writing Rules Suck

Oscar Wilde said: If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.

As a teenager, these words hung upon my wall (on one of those cheap bits of decorated metal you can find on Camden Market). As words to live by, it was right up there with ‘I will not let school get in the way of my education’ and ‘never trust someone who has not brought a book with them’.

When you think about it, redefinition of success is all literature is about.

Shakespeare redefined the sonnet. Laurence Stern redesigned Sentimentalism. Descartes revamped philosophy. Pope reconstructed Englishness. The Sage writers right up to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce and the Beats – were similarly about evoking a new, fresh sense of literary identity as well as society; they’re all showing how literature, and how we think about literature, needs to adapt and challenge and engage with the modern man and culture, our struggles, our failures, our limitations.

Take as an example Realism with a capital R. It started in France circa 1800 appealing to lofty ideals such as verisimilitude and poetic mimesis. Yet these ideas are ones Aristotle and Plato debated whilst they reclined and dined on grapes fed to them by small boys. When you try to read some of the novels produced through the Realist 'movement', you have the extremities of Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot and Dostoevsky. The fact there are so many differences between them - Balzac claims to be a 'historian', Flaubert to have written about 'nothing' – only emphasises how even under the guise of a new ideal, in actuality they simply perpetuate what came before.

On a more contemporary level, let's remember The Matrix - it's Alice in Wonderland meets Plato.

It’s Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

And we can break it down even further. There's an idea only a limited number of tales exist. For example, Christopher Booker claimed only Seven Basic Plots occur throughout literature. So whether you're a writer of crime fiction or romance, fantasy or drama, poetry or prose, all you're doing is redefining what is already written.

Once upon a time, this used to bother me. Actually, there are some days when it still does.

One of my earliest ‘novels’ (I was twelve, I’ve mentioned this attempt before) has a stone in it. This stone can contain a soul piece, though it takes a sacrifice in order to be able to use it. Should the sacrifice be made and the stone accepts the soul, then it keeps the person whose soul it belongs to safe from death.

Sounds familiar right?

Yeah, I thought so too. But there was twelve year old me, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire about to be released, with what amounts to a less evil version of a Horcrux and a character who needs to not be able to die for what little plot I came up with to work.

What was I to do when the inestimable Ms Rowling imagined an idea so eerily similar in the most famous series of our childhood?

At the time, I was aghast. I grumped. I scowled. I tucked the finished draft into a box and struggled with the reality of my concept not being half so original as I thought.

Typing over a decade later, there remains a small rankling child inside me for whom the coincidence still stings. However, the young adult version of me reacts differently. Thrilled at whatever hit-and-run literary smashup occurred, it opened me up to archetypes, theories of form and convention and, consequently, reinvention.

Because having a similar idea or concept or even an entire plot, doesn't mean that your story is any less interesting. Provided you possess a modicum of talent (and are not a twelve year old creating implausible beasts in a narrative thick with formlessness) there is the possibility of writing something that is yours. To take each word of the rule book and scatter them into a thing of imagination.

Genre fiction epitomises convention most overtly; it’s crystallised in your crime novels and romances, your sci-fi adventures and your battle-filled epics. It’s actually a really handy thing. The element of predictability and assumption in genre fiction means readers have an idea of what they’re buying. It also gives writers power. To disrupt and deny and disappoint all those presumptions.

The same goes for literary fiction, storytelling at all levels. Readers remember the writers who scupper those rules, who refute the dos and don’ts. They remembered the ‘but’, the volta, the turn of the piece.

Stories are built and broken on twists giving the finger to reader’s expectations. In doing so, authors not only make their work surprising but make us shudder, fret, cry, laugh, hold our breath and pray for another ending.

I never much liked rules.

Take them as guidelines and develop your own voice - no one else's. 

There are some great words of advice out there for writers; Vonnegut’s lessons are invaluable, Chekov’s insights are peerless, and if you want to grasp how to be ruthless read King. But take them as guidelines, not rules. Use them in the editorial slice and dice. Don’t get caught up in worrying if the idea has appeared before.

There will be different characters, different styles of writing, different voices in your work.

So maybe think about the story and its predecessors, consider where the story's coming from and what you're working with. Perhaps examine ways you could improve upon before, and how it can be relevant now.

Vonnegut said: No modern, postmodern, metafictional, or any wildly unconventional story will succeed unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere.

Such a perfect insight, but it's not everything. It's the subversions of the old-fashioned plots that make a story successful, that create patterns of tensions and release.

There's only one rule in writing and that's to write. Go write. Fuck the rest of the rules and define your own success.

Read More, See More:

Atwood, Margaret. ‘Hair Jewellery’. The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. Ed. Daniel Halpern. London: Penguin. 1987.

Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots. London: Continuum. 2004.

Boyle, T. Coraghessan. ‘Greasy Lake’. Greasy Lake and Other Stories. London: Penguin. 1986.

Chekov, Anton. ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904. London: Penguin. 2002.

Freytag, Gustav. ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’, The Basic Formulas of Fiction. Ed. Foster-Harris. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 1960.

Halpern, Daniel. The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. London: Penguin. 1987.

Joyce, James. ‘Stephan Hero’, Moments of Moments: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany. Ed. Wim Tigges. Netherlands: Editions Rodopi B.V. 1990.

McEwan, Ian. ‘First Love, Last Rites’, The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. Ed. Daniel Halpern. London: Penguin. 1987.

Mishima, Yukio. ‘Patriotism’, The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. Ed. Daniel Halpern. London: Penguin. 1987.

Paz, Octavio. ‘My Life with the Wave’. Eagle or Sun?:Prose Poetry About Mexico trans. Eliot Weinberger. London: Peter Owen Publishers. 1990.

Vonnegut, Kurt. The Shape of Stories. The Man without a Country. http://visual.ly/kurt-vonnegut-shapes-stories-0


Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER

Of Characters & Coffee (or what starts writers writing)

Different writers have different styles of writing. That’s a given. Starting from the very basics of narrative voice to the inspirations behind the story, what makes up a writer’s style is a question of influence, taste, and personal voice. It’s their literary fingerprint. It’s why even the best ghostwriters will always be slightly paler imitations of their author’s voice (regardless of how well the chameleon blends into the background, he’s still not part of it right?).

Yet one element that has always fascinated me but readers and aspiring writers don’t necessarily ever see is the writer’s style of creation.

Oh we’ve all heard about the peculiar ones, the quirky habits: the hoarding of postcards, the walls of notes, the lucky chair that squeaks, the writer who, like some method actor, cloisters himself away in order to experience the same crippling isolation as his protagonist. I’m not focusing there today.

I’m focusing on the stories and how they begin, where they come from, what makes a person pick up their pen and write. It’s the initial spark that I’m curious about and thought I’d discuss.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. 

All together, those neurons contain about enough electrical energy to power a small lightbulb when you’re awake. In fact, our human brains are so fast that it takes the world’s most powerful super-computers 43minutes to process what we do in a second. So with a ton of information flooding the brain at any given moment, it’s no wonder it has to organise everything somehow nor that it does so in story form.

Stories are how we make sense of the world.

Implying all humans are innate storytellers, why then doesn’t everyone tell stories? Why don’t all humans fill up the hours by writing down their ideas? After all, doesn’t the saying go something like: ‘everyone has a story inside of them, waiting to be writ?’

For one, it’s a matter of interest – not everyone cares enough to write and others not enough to finish. More importantly, in this sense, writing isn’t about solipsism and the grand tangle of ganglion cells passing information neuron to neuron. Writing is an opening of one person to another person, a door from one mind to another.

Human language didn’t develop just so we could think in more complex ways, but so we could develop socially. Through ‘social development’ we learn about ‘self’ and ‘other’, and through understanding those things we develop stories because they help us comprehend the barriers, links and blended spaces between persons.

Ok, moving away from my degree in neuroscience, if not everyone has the interest or the determination to be storytellers in the commercial sense, then the writers that succeed, the ones that write and write and regardless of monetary achievement keep writing, must have something that triggers their ideas, that sparks them into action.

Talking to writers you’ll hear about all their different methods. One of the best writers I know (and who I mention frequently – check her and her writing partner out on Nerd Cactus) is a ‘world-builder’. More often than not her inner historian creates a ‘what if’ situation, a world that is transformed by a single decision, and then she comes up with characters to populate it, a theme that drives it, a plot that underpins each sequence of (often unfortunate) events.

My purpose as a writer is to loot my life to the very walls. THOMAS WOLFE #amwriting #writing pic.twitter.com/GPgv79kWO6

— Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters) August 21, 2015

On the other hand, despite working really well together on literary projects (our best is Renegade Earth, the trilogy) I almost always come from a completely different angle. I start with a character. Often just one, who I ‘hear’ in my head. They become part of a scene. That scene develops. We have a discussion: what’s their story, who are they, why should I care. If they fall down in any of these areas, I then investigate whether there’s another person I can talk to instead. I build up from the people, figure out their world, then start on the actual plot and idea.

The way we work together might seem strange. We start in such completely different spaces at times. But it functions because where she can become bogged down in the background, I can pull it back to the people; where I can find myself stuck in one character’s head, she’ll drag me back to the story we’re telling. As part of our development as writers, we’ve learnt from each other and so whilst my ‘initial spark’ is a character and hers more a question, the process is beautifully balanced.

When I put the question to some of the folk on Writer Unboxed, the answers came back with similarly disparate ‘starting points’ for writers. For some it’s when ‘an image blows up’ in their mind – a scene, a moment, complete with words and concepts. For others its all about concepts – they see a thing, remember it; read something, discover a new angle to develop. Some might prefer working with a relationship or a situation.

Most of the writers I spoke to, however, also mentioned that it’s far from being ‘kissed on the ear’ by the muses.

Inspiration might fall into an empty mind, or one that’s so full the idea of fitting more in hurts.

It also can shift. Whilst characters might instigate eight out of ten ideas, later finding an interesting idea in a book of conspiracies or in someone else’s writing is hardly unusual. No two stories are completely the same and no two writers seem to have identical processes.

Seeing the world in different ways is crucial. So whilst we may all claim a coffee habit, or a need for a nicotine fix (this is actually neuroscientifically explicable due to the dopamine dependencies curated by writerly minds that also link to the deficit disorders, depression and creativity associated with them), how we create ideas or start stories is almost entirely distinct from story to story, person to person.

So yes, writers work in different ways and have unique starting points that are as individual to a writer as their literary voice. It also means that if you're writing one way and your favourite writer works another - don't panic. No one really works the same way.

Your artist antenna can be trusted even if it’s not receiving the same signal as everyone else. In fact, that’s probably the best news you can hear.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER

Of Books & Blogs (or how to get over a bad writing day)

Spending the weekend out of London to look after the family dog, my plan was also to spend some quality time writing. I figured I’d get out my typewriter - there’s no where really to keep it in my flat (and the walls are definitely too thin) meaning it currently lives at my parents – so I lug it downstairs and set it up in the kitchen.

I make a coffee. I stack my notes up next to me. I turn on my dad’s epic sound system prepped to blast the soundtrack I’ve put together. Then sitting with a happy dog at my feet, I ready the page, my hands hovering over the keys. And I can feel them: the words at the corners of my mind, so close I can smell the ink… my fingers twitch...

And nothing happens.

Like having that ‘tip of the tongue’ feeling, the words buzzed, blurred and faded before they could become sentiment or sentence.

I tried. I probably wrote two or three pages of first paragraphs and outlines, odd bits of dialogue and random incomplete phrases. But nothing concrete found its way onto the page.

How people write has always fascinated me.

Gore Vidal established the now inevitable coffee/writer relationship, swearing by a ritual of ‘First a coffee, then a bowel movement and then the muse joins me;’ whereas Balzac scribbled furiously for fifteen hours every day (he did succeed in writing hundreds of novels) and fetishised every sentence in editorial. So when it comes to the living, sometimes I desperately wonder: Where do your ideas come from, Mr Gaiman? How did you find the link between birds and brains Mr Powers? What made you want to write, Ms Atwood? And for that matter: what keeps you going?

What keeps them going, what their ‘fix’ is, what’s really going on behind the invisible wall of the page – it’s intriguing as much as it is, perhaps, a little voyeuristic (would you really want to share your bestworst habits with curious minds?).

There’s a book I received, I’d like to say for a birthday, about exactly this ‘Secret Life of Authors.’ Illuming the trinkets and rituals that inspire some of today’s writers, it will one day make excellent toilet reading with each insight coming in page long snippets. Will Self, Ian Rankin, A.S Byatt, Jonathan Lethem, Nicole Krauss, Tash Aw – they all have ‘things’, ‘hobbyhorses’ that inspire or trigger that avalanche of thought.

When I was younger and writing was easier, I never understood why The Adults complained about bleeding into their writing.

Couldn’t they just exist there in the words? All I wanted to do was write: at break time, lunchtime, prep time, dinner time, after dinner, after lights out. I had some great teachers. My French teacher – who you can see giving a TedXTalk – was an Oxford man who used to let me write in his class because if I cared more about words then his lesson, then I should follow that passion. Another, now more commonly know as author Virginia McGregor, even started up a creative writing group in which half the time I’d sit doing my own thing because prompts have never triggered much for me. She allowed it, mostly.

Now, I can sort of see why people who want to write become bogged down. After all, there I was, ready to write, notes at hand, perfect music, perfect day, perfect, perfect, perfect. And nothing. Not an inkling. Not even a hint of an inkling. Stilted. Broken. Blank.

Perhaps I overdid it – there was such a sense of preparation about being on the farm, with the typewriter and the music and the old dog. It was like scheduling a romantic evening then realising it feels like a funeral with the dead flowers and candles and mannered conversation.

So I stopped writing. I turned off the music. I pulled the pages from the typewriter, stacked them on top of my notes (who knows, maybe a flake of genius is in there after all #hoarder). And I went outside with the dog to finish my third coffee.

Right now, I’m sure there’s a few readers shaking their heads.

What’s the first rule of aspiring novelists? Keep going - write – write anything – just bloody write.

But I hate that rule.

I don’t write because other people tell me to finish. I don’t write for the sake of writing. I write for the sake of me. Because when I don’t write it’s like when a hangry person hasn’t eaten.

Obviously, if you want to be a writer then time has to be spent writing. Because if only you’d stop talking about your novel and start writing your novel, because if only you made time for your novel instead of complaining about your work hours, because if only you’d just put one word in front of the other and finish what you’ve started then maybe – maybe – you’ll be en route to being an author.

But it shouldn’t mean sitting with half-formed things twisting beneath your fingers that aren’t ready. Forcing words out for the sake of it shouldn’t be the first titbit of advice to give to anyone writing their book.

Sometimes, that approach can be more damaging than helpful. It can make you resent the work, want to neglect the idea.

Personally, the feeling of Presque Vu is usually because I’m worn through and I need to do something else. It’s not writer’s block (where the blank page is winning so hard it hurts and it really is a matter of writing anything to defeat it), this is the feeling of otherness that comes from too many expectations and pressure. When my head is in it but the rest is pure automaton.

So here’s what I do if writing feels like falsehood.

1. Write something else. Blogs are good for this and they often relieve some of that pressure.
2. Make notes. Draw plans. Draw characters. Draw a tree or a map. Whatever, do something with your hands.
3. Read. Books are good for the soul, make you more intelligent, stave off dementia, and are the blood of good writing. Just ask Hemingway.
4. Watch a film – I’m not talking a Netflix binge. Watching something challenging or a documentary that ties into your book can help.
5. Drink - coffee, tea, whiskey, Hangman's Blood, pick your poison and have a cup of your favourite brew if you think it'll put you in the zone.
6. Talk to yourself. Struggling with dialogue? Act it out. You might look like a lunatic but ask Nerd Cactus and you’ll find at least one of them finds this central to her creative output.
7. Talk to someone else – not about writing. Leave the book alone.
8. Go for a walk. Go enjoy the outdoors. Get on a bus and go somewhere. Sometimes we spend so much time inside four walls, it’s just not healthful. Visit life.
9. Do something you enjoy – whether that’s singing like no one can hear you, dancing around in your underwear, or throwing fruit off a rooftop – go find your happy place.
10. Don't beat yourself up over it. If you're writing regularly and not just talking about writing regularly, these days will happen. It's a bad writing day. They're there to make the good ones even better.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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Of Astronauts & Authors (or why writers dream big)

Recently, I’ve read a lot about the role of the online world in the lives of writers. At the Writer’s Digest Annual Forum 2015, FutureBook were there on stage talking about writing and the community, assessing the impact community has had upon the way we write and the way we publish literature.

“Once,” they commented, “writing was the most solitary of professions; now it’s the most social.” 

And that made me think. Who would I be today if not for the initial spark of encouragement to write? Who would I be without my community, my writing buddies like Nerd Cactus, or more recently my boxing partner who spars with ideas as much as her fists?

 

Until I was about eight, I wanted to be an astronaut.

I was born the year the walls came down and the webs went up. It was the last year of the Cold War. The first year of the Internet Age.

My dad had a mobile phone that looked like a defibrillator and our little family of three lived in a many-storied townhouse in Wandsworth. It was at least a decade before it became fashionable to live there. At one end of our road was a school for badly behaved boys and at the other an ageing hooker worked the corner, flashing sagging lingerie and raw gums to anyone who stared.

A few years later and the family had grown – the twins had arrived and the dog was given away. My brother and I pushed my sister down some stairs (I don’t think it was deliberate). We moved out of London to an old farm with far fewer staircases. Out there, in the countryside, you could see stars. I don’t think I’d ever seen them properly, living in the city, and I remember spending hours with my dad staring upwards with him pointing out Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Orion’s Belt and Sword, Cassiopeia, Gemini, Draco.

At the time, no one realised how crap I was going to be at maths and physics – or that I’d turn out to be terrified of flying – but there it was: whilst everyone else wanted to look after fluffy animals or was fussing over their Barbie’s latest car, I was organising Beanie Babies into rocket ships and sending them off to Mercury. I’d imagine them running around trying to find the cold side of the planet the same way you chase the cold side of a pillow.

Even as pre-teens we knew the basics of computers – how to cut, paste, copy, undo, and how to take part in online games. The sound of dial-up modem added a beep-beep-boop-whirligig tone to our childhood.

Then I had The Teacher. A title that here refers to one of those fizzbubbling educators that make you enquire within about everything. She set an assignment: use alliteration, similes and metaphors in a one-page ‘fill in the blanks’ exercise. Me being the precocious and loquacious brat that I still am, handed back a three page story ‘TBC’.

She replied with a bumblebee sticker and offhand reassurance: you should write a book.

So I did.

I started straight away. Finished it when I was thirteen. It was god-awful. Every chapter introduced a new character or someone got kidnaped. I invented mythical beasts called Raziguls that looked like a kraken drawn by a clay-brained, knotty-pated fool (aged 13 I liked to think I was good at art but I have about as much talent for it as Katie Hopkins does tact).

My parents were kind. They were nice about my new hobby. They indulged me as I turned up the volume on Dark Side of the Moon and spent hours scribbling.

They also let me use the Internet. From 6pm onwards, when dial-up was cheaper, I was allowed to go online and browse. I quickly became part of my first online writing community: Stories.com (now Writing.com).

Writing was like the lights turning on. I started typing tales with other people, posting and sharing my work, giving and receiving feedback.

Dreams of going to the moon simmered away as I realised, with words, I could go to any planet I wanted and take other people with me. And all those constellation, they had stories to tell. Writing became essential. To feel the body electric.

Stories are the first and most primal virtual reality. They are inherently social - blurring and blending the boundaries of self and other. We might construct them as individuals but they are shared spaces, interactive spaces between reader, author and text.

Think of it this way: through fiction, life becomes like a house riddled with a thousand secret passageways to other houses, other dreamscapes and landscapes and worlds. Through the Internet, those metaphorical spaces become even more extensive and multi-dimensional. They invite you not just to walk through other people’s houses but to help build them.

Moreover, as the Internet has grown, as computerized, multilinked writings that are as integrated as any social network have extended, the nature of the literary has only expanded to become more inclusive, more allusive, more virtual. And this, from where I’m typing, is closer to the social mind than ever.

Flash forward a few years.

It was around university when I started to become disillusioned with larger communities online. There was so much pressure to be involved with everyone else that I'd forgotten about my own work and ideas. And whilst I appreciated the odd pats on the back from strangers, I relished the feedback that was brutal, honest, insightful. I hated the platitudes people offered: ‘Buddy, I’m so sorry your story got rejected – I’d give it 1000% out of ten, ignore the haters.’ There was so much of the Simply Positive attitude when what I needed was someone who’d help me kill my darlings. Even if they just whispered over my shoulder whilst I pulled the trigger.

From where I was sitting, editing had fallen into a rut. Editors are supposed to edit: well, of course. What else should they do? But the turning wheel of the publishing industry made it seem that publishers no longer read like writers. They read like accountants. Where were the Claire Walshes or the James Woods or the Gertrude Steins? Where were the editors – not the publishers – who’d tear a book a part and then give the writer a needle, thread and an outline by which to stitch it back together again?

So I took a step back. Not a big one, but enough that I was able to focus more on my own writing and on offering to others the kind of feedback I thought was valuable. I started reading like a writer. Editing. It was 2011. Jonathan Franzen had just had some trouble with his book, Freedom, which to his utter dismay was launched in bookshops riddled with errors he’d thought edited out weeks previously.

Today’s social landscape is shaped by the pervasive influence of digital technology. It’s created a paradigm shift in the way that we live, interact, think of others and ourselves. It’s transformed writing and publishing. It has the potential to do great things for literature. And is doing them, in some places.

The digital has not destroyed writing, or relegated editing to the cemetery of forgotten talents. It’s just taken a little while for the literary business to balance out again with literary art. Dig below the surface, innovators exist. Dig deeper, communities can be helpful (see Writer Unboxed), provide support and genuine feedback.

I’ll never regret being part of online culture or writing circles.

Writing is solitary. To have a group that understands your problems and will have those peculiar conversations about writing can be stimulating and may even help when it comes to marketing and selling your work. Through it I’ve met people I admire, people I adore, people I'd play my part for if it'll help them succeed. They're adventurers too. And I suspect a fair few of them wanted to be astronauts back in the day.

So whilst I resent Team Follow Back, I also respect it. And whilst I roll my eyes at automated content, I understand why there’s a need. And whilst I’d rather be on the periphery of a writing community, I will always make the effort to take part.

Fact is, I’m an inevitable creation of the Internet. A digital native. Comfortable online and offline. Aware that IRL is as imaginary as Hogwarts.

And if you’re reading this, most likely, so are you.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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