A Grave Undertaking

So there we were, watching the telly last night. Jo Brand was on fine form, hosting the last of the current series of Have I Got News For You. And slap bang in the middle of the programme, Ian Hislop mentioned a new word to me (not to me personally, I'm aware there are many other viewers as well as a studio audience): taphophile.

So Anne, who does not enjoy the idea of appearing in this blog, looks in my direction and says, "That's what you are." Now, I've always thought I like a good graveyard as much as the next man (or woman - taphophility is an equal opportunity pastime), but it turns out that I like it more.*

A graveyard can be a haven for nature and one of the few places to see a decent yew tree. There's social history there too and, more importantly, personal stories. It sounds obvious to say it, but these were real people who lived, loved and went the way we're all heading. I find all of the above both sobering and cause for reflection. As a writer, I also draw inspiration - from the names, the poignancy of the dedications, the artistry of the headstones and the sheer atmosphere of the place. I'm also drawn to war memorials, but that's another story.

Writing about death and mortality in fiction can be a test of nerve, sensitivity and skill. Most adult readers will know what death and grief sound like, smell like and feel like. Whether it's a thriller, a fantasy novel or even a comedy (I can only speak for myself here), we aim for authenticity. And the way we do that is to draw upon our own experience or our imagination of that experience. I haven't gone so far as to borrow names from headstones yet, but I have tried to draw on the mood of the graveyard and what it represents - peace, closure, loss and anger. In the end, I suspect, we're each exalted in that final scene or brought down to earth by mortality.

Writing about death and grief in non-fiction is another ball of beeswax. I've commented on that before so rather than repeat myself, here's that link:

http://alongthewritelines.blogspot.com/2009/08/crossing-line.html

So here's to you David.

* The picture was taken in Scotland. We were visiting Rosslyn Chapel and I wanted to check out some supposed Templar or Masonic graves. I suppose that's a little exotic even for taphophiles!

The writing on the wall

There are some books that immediately speak to some inner part of us. Within a page or two we are entranced, with that same focus and attention that we had as children when we read under the covers because we couldn't bear to leave a chapter unfinished.

While writers such as Tolkien and J K Rowling have overtly dipped their bread into the mythical soup, many other writers - knowingly or unknowingly - conjure up archetypes that we embrace gladly like old friends.

In the field of writing itself there are also archetypes (or cliches, if you prefer). The struggling artist, the posthumous success (Steig Larson), the 'I happened to go to school with a literary agent' (also not-so-fondly referred to as 'the jammy bastard') and a clutch of others, which you can recognise at any writing conference or creative support group. Myths are powerful cloaks to wear however, and over time can become so comfortable that we don't notice the cloth beginning to tighten in. And, in their purest form, myths give us definition and insight; they exalt the best of human traits and they warn of the consequences of the worst. They are a rambler's map of our own psyche.

Joseph Campbell examined myths and cultural tales from different places and identified similarities and key stages. His Hero of a Thousand Faces is a good starter if you're new to him.

Campbell proposed three distinct stages for the hero's quest:

1. Separation (e.g. leaving the village, seeking love / adventure, etc)

2. Initiation (the trials and tribulations that are overcome)

3. Return (the hero transformed who arrives bearing gold, wisdom or some other reward from the quest).

I've often thought there ought to be a stage between stages 1 and 2, a 1a if you will. I call it 1a. Preparation. Every piece of writing, in a sense, is a quest to transform and translate ideas into a cohesive narrative. And, unless you plan to keep your work in a drawer forever, one of those writer initiations lies in bringing your word to print or at least to the reader in some form.

We can learn a lot from mythology. About how it stirs the emotions and shapes thinking, about how each culture and civilisation wrestles with the same human frailties and finds ways to illustrate the dynamics of the human condition. And we can learn how to condense the experience of everyone into the story of anyone.

When the Egyptians - or any other civilisation for that matter - defined their pantheons and legends, they were really creating stories that would echo through the ages. As grandiose as that sounds, perhaps that's what all good writing aspires to do as well.

Lost and found in Lyonnesse

What child doesn't like the idea of living on a tropical island, palms swaying in the breeze and pale sand to run your toes through? Cue music... Add to that a dash of mystery and hidden treasure, and you have all the makings of a classic children's book.*

Or failing that, a week away to recharge the batteries, where all of the above still hold. (Okay, the Isles of Scilly have a sub-tropical microclimate, but let's not quibble.)

The IoS lie just 28 miles west of the British mainland and some say they are the remains of the lost land of Lyonnesse. Five islands are inhabited (I know, that sounds adventurous just on its own) and the main island St Mary's can be reached by helicopter, ferry or plane. We once took the two and a half hour ferry crossing and it was rougher than a cat's tongue coated in industrial sandpaper. I flew back by helicopter alone, praising the god of aviation.

The plane is our preferred mode of transport and takes off from a grassy airfield on a cliff. We fly at around 1000 feet and the journey takes a mere 15 minutes. From St Mary's it's a short boat trip to St Agnes, having taken my trusty ginger capsules beforehand! Okay, that's enough of a plug for the tourist industry.

The main attraction of St Agnes is the lack of distraction. Unplugged from email, a reliable mobile phone signal and familiar routines, a transformation quickly takes place. I find myself actually writing with a pen again - usually up to 12,000 words in the week we stay there. And I read more - the cottage is stacked with books. Had it not been for St Agnes I would never have encountered Raymond Carver or Elmore Leonard, never dipped into Margaret Atwood or tried yet another Anne Tyler book and still found it didn't speak to me. And every book I ingest changes my writing in subtle ways, if only temporarily. I take on other voices and sometimes they stick around to join the throng.

* I mentioned mystery and treasure, and I try to keep my promises. The mystery I pondered most - apart from how to pay the bills when we get back - was how all these writers found their voice and their niche. There they rest upon the shelves, jostling for arm room - the genre specific and the literary; and all of them have made the novelist's journey from 'nagging away at your brain' midnight idea to the finished page-flicking product. Best of all perhaps is that they all approached it differently. other writers can only draw strength from that. As the writer Brian Keaney reminded me, there is no magic formula. You write your best work and then you try to place it somewhere. The End. Or at least, The End when you choose to give up and leave the arena.

The mystery then becomes less about how to achieve something and more about why one takes the path they have. So I spent time looking at where I've put my creative energy and the projects that have either yielded little fruit or none at all. Surrounded by the sea and the constantly shifting breeze, I find my thoughts mould to the unceasing rhythms.

Sometimes it's good to let things go and move on, to stand on the shore and wave goodbye to those paper rafts we launched with such fierce ambition. For me that has meant relinquishing a humour column in a Canadian magazine because economic reality is more important than the cachet of a line on my CV. Even though the tide will eventually submerge them, it's good to know where we draw our lines in the sand!

And for the writers that I know, the greatest mystery is always 'what next?'. As a friend of mine in California used to say, "Life is a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved." Which, the internet informs me, is probably a quote from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkgaard.

* I also promised treasure. There were two kinds of treasure on the trip, each tangible in its way. The first was a story - the kind that arrive as a pleasant surprise, fully formed and racing through your mind as you grasp at the rushing mist. A folk tale of sorts, about the plight of mermaids and the children they leave behind. The second treasure was the discovery of a box, while out walking. A tin box - the sort a child might keep their special things in (see the delightful film Amelie) - and containing a letter of some kind and some pearls. The tin in a plastic bag that also contained a plastic angel, hidden underneath a rock. I found it by a combination of serendipity and clumsiness. I didn't read the letter and put it all back where I found it.

There's probably a story in all that somewhere, but it's not one for me at the moment. I'm too busy working out the next chapter of my own adventure as a writer.

The Ones That Got Away (and one that didn't)

Hello and ahoy to everyone. I'm just back from a relaxing and contemplative week on the Isles of Scilly. But more about that in a separate post, teaser that I am.

It appears I've been more circumspect than I intended recently, regarding my progress in securing representation for one of my novels. I had an email from someone upon my return, asking if in fact I now had an agent for my Brit thriller Standpoint. So it seemed only fair to clear the air, like a literary twitter.

In a word: no. The agent was concerned about my novel's distinctiveness and felt an agent specific to that genre would be more likely to secure a publishing deal for me. Since then I've approached his three recommended publishers directly and I'm waiting to hear from two of them (one will only talk to agents).

Elsewhere, I finally got a response back from a sci-fi / fantasy publisher in the US about another novel Covenant (God loves a trier, as our mum used to say). Writers typically expect to wait around 3 months for a response to a submission, whether it be by email or the trusty envelope. But I think I have reached something of a record here - something that even rivals the year it took to get a proof edit of the same novel by a previous publisher (who then went out of business).

Cue drum roll...

Dear Author,

Thank you for your patience as we considered your novel. Unfortunately, it does not seem right for us. Due to the volume of manuscripts we receive and the press of other business it is impossible for us to go into particulars. Please do not take this rejection as necessarily a reflection on your work; we can accept fewer than one percent of the manuscripts submitted to us. Best of luck in another market.

And how long did it take to get that feedback? Take a breath...

1 year, 3 months and 16 days.

Patience, is is said, is a virtue. This timescale, however, is just a week shy of the gestation of the Grey Rhino (source: Vaughn Aubuchon). Still, it could have been worse; it could have been an Indian Elephant.

And because I know everyone likes to end on a high note - there's a joke in there somewhere about the sex life of an opera singer - I do now have another little book out there in print. I was going to wait for the link to be set up then badger you all mercilessly about it (I still might), but there's no time like the present. And no present as suitable as this book.

The Wanderer is a contemplative read, described by an editor from another publishing house as 'wonderfully reflective'. It's a short tale of a man who wakes up on a beach and who then sets out on a journey of self-discovery. www.awordwithyoupress.com/store

Memory Maker

Do you have a friend who consistently gets a fact wrong, even if it’s a detail about an event that you’ve previously corrected them on? It’s as if that piece of information is permanently misfiled or corrupted – the memory equivalent of two synapses stuck in a death grip handshake.

It reminds me (no pardon intended) of False Memory Syndrome, which has been offered up as an explanation for some allegations child abuse or alien abduction. My own particular false memory is less contentious, but no less puzzling.

Our dad died when I was twenty-two and our mum followed him, about five years later. However, I also have these pseudo memories, of dad outliving mum and there being just dad, my brother and I living in the house.

It’s only a quirk of imagination of course, unless the idea of parallel universes periodically intersecting ours appeals to you. But that empirical understanding has never changed the quality of the experience for me. It’s as if I have two competing sets of memories – the one, sharp as a scalpel; the other, hazier, as if trying to recall a film you saw long ago. And both have endured over the years.

Part of the process of writing, I think, involves the writer undergoing a journey of self-revelation. The more we write, the deeper we dig, and as our characters and plot and dialogue unfold, so we see more facets of our self. Rather than hiding in our work – irrespective of the genre or how far-removed from our own experience the ideas might be – I’ve come to the conclusion that we actually want to be found: the writer revealed.

Good writing is authentic – it shows us what it is to be a living, breathing and feeling human being. It doesn’t matter if the stories are comic or tragic or dramatic or undemanding, whether they inhabit the past, present, future or never-could be. Human, alien, animal, faery, robot or fridge – it’s all the same as long as it touches us.

And why this, now? I’m glad you asked!

As I’ve been working through the first draft of Scars & Stripes, reviewing my memory of real events and seeing where imagination can trip off the page, I’m aware that the line between truth and fiction is becoming blurred. The emotions (and in some places, the dialogue) from one world are being siphoned off into another of my own making.

The interesting thing though is that, having decanted real events into fiction narrative, I have a much clearer perspective on both the vintage and the nouveau.

Lex and the Pity too

Okay, so it’s not the greatest wordplay title ever and ‘lex’ isn’t even a real word – even if lexis was Greek for ‘word’. Although it does give me the opportunity to reference the excellent Mslexia magazine.

I watched Sex and the City 2 last night. I enjoyed the first film and the series had brilliant dialogue threading through it like veins of gold. But part deux…well, let me tell you a little story first.

Back in the day, I went to see the first Bridget Jones film – me, Anne, a friend of ours and a friend of hers over from Germany. At the risk of generalising, I’d say I was the only guy watching screen one and I was probably also the only one not laughing. The German woman sat one side of me leaned over and said, “I am watching this film and I see that other people are laughing, but you are not laughing and I am wondering why this is?” I took a deep breath and explained that I’d broken my nose when I was thirteen and in comparison that experience was funnier.

I’ve revised my opinion since then, I should add, both about the Bridget Jones films and breaking my nose. Believe me, there’s nothing funny about finding cartilage in your mouth unexpectedly.

Sex & the City 2, however, managed to offend me twice. And I’m pretty hard to offend.

The first offence was the way that Carrie Bradshaw was portrayed as a writer. Yes, of course I know it’s fiction and meant to be entertaining, but it still got my goat. There she is, her sing-song voice merrily tweeting away about some article she needs to write – fortunately she has an unused apartment she can stay in undisturbed for a couple of days to do her literary stuff, as all writers do.

Come on, I hear you whisper, it’s just a first offence – let it go.

Wait, I haven’t told you about the second, more heinous offence. She’s a writer, right? So when she pens an article entitled The Terrible Twos, you wouldn’t expect to see an apostrophe in among those three words at the top of the page? Rent the DVD and check it out though.

Yes, my friends, unlawful use of an apostrophe: bang to rights. That's got to be worth two years in solitary confinement - ample time to write Sex & the City 3.

The best writing job ever – by which I mean the worst

I don’t know exactly what it is that draws me time and time again to trawling the Internet for writing gigs. Could it be the great clients I’ve met along the way and even the not so great? Maybe. Could it be the rich diversity of business requirements across three continents? Yep, that would be part of it. But it’s also the occasionally breathtaking, stupendously ridiculous ads that are out there if you lift enough rocks.

This ad that not only took the biscuit, it licked off the cream in the middle (the metaphorical biscuit was a custard cream), put the two pieces back together and then replaced it in the packet. It went something like this…

Hello there!

I have received a lot of replies to my job advert and after going through all the resumes and replies I have chosen a couple of writers [if ‘couple’ meant a dozen] that I think would fit the job well. For a job like this, a small amount of training is required. I know you are an experienced writer and all, but I require you to read an e-book that is similar to the content and tone I'm after. This position is a very laid back job and brings you great pay and incentives. You get to write about what you know and love, which itself is something you can’t put a price on.

So in order to be one of the chosen few for this job I need you to:

1. Get this e-book called – [Naturally I Won’t Be Advertising It Here!] which you can find at: [http://one-born-every-minute] I know that it costs around $10 and I'd like to provide it to you for free. But I simply can't due to copyright laws and creative commons laws. I’m sure you understand as a writer and wouldn’t want your work stolen or given away. The writer of that e-book is actually a great guy and a friend of mine [they might even share the same name...] so by paying for it you are helping out a fellow writer. And you’ll be able to afford two copies of his book in only one paid hour working for me. After the trial, I mean.

2. When you get the book, I need you to read it quickly - it’s pretty short so don’t worry, but it's still worth $10 of anybody’s money. Then write at least a 300 word article that summarizes what the e-book is all about, for the readers of my site [http://client's-nearly-empty-website]. And I need to know exactly how long it took you to write the article.

This will be your training and a test for this job – that way we save time. Training isn’t paid for - that way I save money. Good luck everyone and remember to submit the article to me by the 5th of February to be in with a great chance of employment. I’m expecting a lot of entries so write quickly and let’s do business! lol.

And the client very kindly put everyone’s email address in CC so we could write to one another about what a great opportunity this could be. Not.

Here is my reply:

This is the most entertaining job offer I've had in a long while.

If I may:

1. Creative Commons specifically allows for the distribution of copyrightedworks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_License

2. Plumbers don't so try-outs, carpenters don't do try-outs and shop assistants don't do try-outs. Neither does this writer. Money should flow to the writer and not from them. The idea that a writer ought to pay for the privilege of trying out (i.e. writing a piece for free) is ludicrous.

So thanks for the opportunity, but I'll pass this time.

I'm guessing the would-be client was too busy with their other writers to respond.

I fired my first client

I like to think that I've experienced most of the surprises that freelancing has to offer, but don't count your chickens - or your clients - before they're hatched. I recently ticked off a brand new one for the journal by firing a client.

The client wasn't a difficult person; they weren't hard to get hold of or vague in their requirements. There was just one thing we couldn't agree on and that was money. Or rather, we had agreed on it and then subsequently it turned out we hadn't. And then after all that was resolved, we ended up in some spooky Twilight Zone re-run of the first issue.

It played out a little like this... (and you'll have to imagine the Twilight Zone music tinkling in)...

The client and I swap a few emails and agree terms for the freelance writing and editing. As part of that agreement we have a two-hour 'trial' which the client agrees upfront to pay for. I try to avoid spec work as there is a tendency for spec to end up being an abbreviation for suddenly proves economic catastrophe.

Anyhow, I do the work and the client is happy and we speak on the phone - not skype, but the real phone and long-distance too. And the bluebirds of happiness are dancing over the keyboard because they know that the freelancing faeries have cast their magic spell.

Shortly afterwards, the Paypal faery shows 4 hours payment, but the email says that's for four hours in advance. I do a double-take and check back and sure enough, I did the writing I thought I had. I also know this because those bluebirds are still on my keyboard. So I email my client and ask what the dickens is going on.

The client says they 'sort of thought my original two-hours of work was a way of me selling and showcasing my skills to get the gig'. Being both organised and twitchy, I keep all emails and quickly dig out the 'I'll pay you for the trial' email and ping it off with a sense of concern.

But it's fine. The client emails back and says 'no problemo' or something similar. I finish the second two hours of writing and editorial work and clear the decks for the next four hours, reasonably reassured. So which of these scenarios do you think occurs next?

1. The client asks me to work for four hours and then send an invoice for payment.

2. The client asks to pay in advance for another four hours of work.

3. The client pays for four hours of work in advance, but says I owe them six hours because there's still two hours to be done from the first payment?

If you answered number three, award yourself a cookie, a piece of chocolate or some other sugar-filled delight. Yes, that's right, 'no problemo' has gone on a diet and become just 'problemo'.

What I did was go back through all the emails to give the client a chronology of our exchanges, including work and payment. I also pointed out we were having our second disagreement about the same two hours in a matter of days, and that consequently I was returning their advance payment  - minus the two hours I had actually worked - and ending our work agreement with immediate effect.

And that, dear reader, is how I came to fire my first (and potentially lucrative) client. And the lesson here? Even when the money is good, know your own boundaries.

How low can you go?

Wordcount, that is. The 100 word One Tight Write competition, run by A Word with You Press, is going great guns. It's remarkable how much you can fit into such a small space, like the literary equivalent of the joke about fitting four elephants in a Mini.

I've written 50 and 60 word stories in the past, but the most celebrated short story is surely Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece: For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

The Arvon Foundation ran its own six short words competition earlier this year and these were my entries (with thanks to fellow writer Susie, who is better at archiving my emails than I am):

One survives, one dies; now choose.

Last human, online; then instant message.

Congratulations! I blanch, knowing I'm impotent.

Good to see you again, Lucifer.

Published at last and no one suspects.

Till death us do part... goodbye.