Growing as a writer (and as a person)

I am doing something this weekend that absolutely terrifies me. Sketchcrawl is worldwide activity but in Brighton, at the Jubilee Library, at midday on Saturday 21st November, it will be happening to me!

I am a terrible sketcher (getting better, but very slowly) and my urban sketches are the worst of my work. So why am I doing this to myself?

Because when I signed up for it, I was the kind of person who wanted to grow, and I wanted to meet other artists because that would help me, and I wanted to draw Brighton, because I love it, and bringing those two together would make me grow, whether I wanted to or not.

But today I am not that person – today I am a shivering wreck of terror about the whole thing. I don’t want to expose my paltry sketch skills to the very much better artists who might come along. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s Saturday by having organised something that turns out to be dreck. I don’t want the responsibility or the pain or the humiliation.

But I do want to grow. So I’m going through with it. If you have paper and pencil, feel free to join me – as you cannot possibly be worse at this than me, and even if by some amazing chance you were, I will be kind and supportive and happy to see you, because that’s what I’m hoping to other, better, artists will be for me. And I'm already in contact with one accomplished, lovely artist who will be coming along, and that's a GOOD start.

So growing is painful. But necessary. I’m growing into a different form of writing too – two different forms, actually. Excellent Agent has me working on a book-length non-fiction. I feel quite odd about it: one the one hand, it’s making me a better writer, on the other I’m nervous that I could end up ‘doing’ non-fiction for life when I really want to be a novelist. So I’ve opted to grow in another way too –I’ve found an artist with whom I’ve very excited about working on a graphic novel, provisionally entitled Savage’s Steam Emporium.

Todd Alan is great, nearly as driven as me, and proving to be fun to work with. Of course I am not going to become a full-time graphic novel writer, but it’s been a dream of mine since I picked up my first Marvel comic, aged 12. And I’m equally terrified about this too: maybe Todd will put in hours of work for no purpose, maybe publishers will laugh at us, maybe Excellent Agent will blow her stack at me for doing this (EA, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) when I should be working on serious income-generating projects.

But I’m growing. And that is the only thing to do. What doesn’t grow, stultifies, and who wants to be a stult?

Sooo… the things I wanted to talk about:

Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Stranger than Fiction. I really enjoyed this, and Jim’s profoundly idiosyncratic view of the world is always fascinating. I tried to come up with one of those pithy one-liners that you are supposed to use to encapsulate a project for the movie industry (which is popularly supposed not to be able to cope with more than a sentence of information at a time) and what I decided on was Alan Bennett meets Douglas Adams! The characters from Jim’s previous novel are resurrected, having died at the end of the last one, in a manner not unreminiscent (is that a word?) of Eoin Colfer’s continuation of the work of said Douglas Adams. I loved it. Jim’s novel, I mean, not Eoin’s – haven’t read that and probably won’t – I’m not sure why I don’t like writers picking up the work of deceased literary stars and taking it on, but I don’t.

Writers who won’t – don’t get me started! I have been talking to a writer for seven months (seven!) about a project that she’s capable of achieving and has all mapped out, but she just can’t bring herself to start. Way back in 2006 Fortune Magazine’s Geoffrey Colvin wrote an article highlighting research that shows that the gap between success and failure is filled by practice and consistent feedback on the quality of that practice. Now I’m not a great fan of workshops, because I think they become an end in themselves for many people, but if some writers just used a quarter of the time they spend thinking and talking about their work on actually getting words down, they would develop some of that practice and might find that not only did their ability to work improve, but the work itself did too.

But then there are writers who won’t stop. I feel guilt every November when I watch some talented writers diving into NaNoWriMo with flailing abandon. You see, when I was a NaNo coordinator I pushed a lot of these people into their November excess and now I watch in horror this one and only time of the year that they write anything at all. It’s an unintended by-product of NaNo frenzy that some writers find they can’t get into the habit of writing all year round, or writing without the plaudits and excitement of the massive social network that surrounds the event. And this means that in November they are happy to produce 50 or 70 or even 90 thousand words that they put in a drawer and forget about. It’s as if they store up all their writing stimulus through the year to splurge it out in one great orgy of unstoppable wordiness. Okay, it’s not my problem (I’m not a coordinator any more, for one thing) but it does worry me more than a little that NaNo might be destroying writers rather than creating them. Anybody else got any evidence, especially to disprove my theory that a few writers can only perform under NaNo stimulus?

And I was going to blog about an average day in my life, but it’s too depressing to contemplate the deadlines looming over me right now, so I shall save it for next time.

The picture shows Morgan, formerly known as Toulouse, but she wouldn't answer to it ...

Missing In Action

That's what I am, and I apologise to you for it. But by next week I hope to be back with:

1. A book review
2. Commentary on a day in the life of a writer
3. A short rant about writers who won't start and writers who won't stop.

Until then, I beg your pardon, but I am working flat out on lots of things, ministering to the kittens (one of whom has been renamed) and just not having quite enough time to go round.

I'll be back ...

October – a writing Indian summer?

Right, final reminder for Fear of the Dark – should be a night to remember! Tickets are £5 or £4 for concessions available on the night or in advance from the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton or fearofthedark.eventbrite.com

Apart from that, I’m suddenly full speed ahead on Year of the Ladybird Plague again, after a pretty long stalled period related to research into the criminal justice system, working on a non-fiction project at Excellent Agent’s suggestion and playing around (again) with something vaguely Young Adult: based in Brighton and focused on love, lacrosse and leg length (no, I made that last clause up, everything after ‘Brighton’ is deliberate misdirection), I am going to pitch that graphic novel before the end of the month (better get my act together then, eh?) and that’s all, I think, apart from feeling bad about not doing NaNoWriMo this year, although Brighton (and Hove actually) is being wonderfully moderated by some truly wonderful moderators. I hope you all have fun with words in November …

Ladybird courtesy of Richard B-S at Flickr

Too many (or two many) things to write about

So, first and foremost – I’m taking part in an excellent event, called Fear of the Dark, organised by the lovely James Burt. He’s put together some information about the event, and I can’t do better than give it to you verbatim (as it were): Fear of the Dark is a special one-off spoken word night on Thursday 29 October 2009 at Brighton’s Marlborough Theatre. Beginning in a brightly lit theatre, the lights will fade with each successive act until the final act takes place in near-complete darkness.

The night is inspired by an old Sussex tradition of telling stories in the nights leading up to Halloween. It was said that the best stories would bring luck, with the ghosts leaving gifts for the tellers. Fear of the Dark will include strange and disturbing performances to amuse and entertain, as well as cake, apple-bobbing and a musical interlude.

• Glue Gun ‘91, have recently held a series of sell-out nights above the Victory Pub, featuring music, poetry, papier-mâché and live cake-making. They are also appearing as part of Brighton’s White Night event on 24 October.
• James Burt, one of the performers at Fear of the Dark, is a regular at Brighton’s spoken word nights and has appeared several times at literary event Short Fuse, as well as at Tight Lip and Sparks.
• Kay Sexton is a professional writer and blogger. In the five years she has been writing, Kay Sexton’s fiction has been chosen for over thirty anthologies. In 2008 she was commissioned to write a short story broadcast on British national radio.
• Bernadette Cremin is a well-known poet, whose book Speechless was published by Waterloo Press. She has an album due for release soon and recently completed a poetry tour of Ireland.

Tickets are £5 or £4 for concessions. They are available on the night or in advance from the Marlborough Theatre or from Eventbrite.

Okay, so the only claim I will make for myself here is that if you come along, you will see me as nobody has ever seen me before. I can laud my fellow participants though, because James is a great reader and Bernadette is simply wonderful – not to be missed. Glue Gun I know not, but look forward to with fear, trembling and a certain amount of excitement. Please do come along, and make it a thrilling night.

Writing for clients. What a nightmare October has been in some respects. I did actually break down and bleat about client stupidity on Facebook, but I didn’t even cover the half of it. This past two weeks has been notable for the varying quality of client responses to my input. Usually my business clients are calm and simple, while my fiction clients are much more demanding (perhaps because they care more, perhaps because words are their business as much as mine) but this month has been an object lesson in not assuming that the past can tell the future.

I’m working with (currently unpublished) crime writer Phil McCumskey and he couldn’t be easier to get along with, nor more fun. Not that he is going to agree with everything I say, but he’s determined to make his novel as good as it can get, and so we’re definitely working to the same end.

My latest business client (who has to be nameless, for legal reasons) is a nightmare. I edited a three thousand word document down to sixteen hundred words and he returned it to me with every it’s that I’d corrected in it’s [sic] content reinstated. I explained that it’s is an abbreviation for it is, not a sign that something belongs to 'it'. His reply was unconvinced.

But Saturday’s experience was the pit of my editorial experience to date. Said client, who is a ‘visual person’ (his words) texted me to suggest that as the appearance of his website was all important, he’d like me to ‘harmonise’ the usage of there and their as the page in question would look a lot better that way. Indeed it would – but it wouldn’t make any sense!

I pointed out that if he wants to win a client base, telling them that there image is safe in his hands [sic] is not a way to inspire confidence. ‘Y not’ he texted. I think he meant ‘Y not?’ and replied on that basis that somebody who doesn’t take care of the words they use to describe themselves won't look as if they are likely to take care of the impression they create of their clients. I expected to get another ‘Y not’ but there was a long silence – a weekend long silence, in fact, until this morning when my client’s business partner texted me to say that from now on, he’d be approving my work as the ‘visual person’ didn’t get the point of text.

Fair enough, and I wouldn’t have taken him on as a client if his work – in his chosen field - wasn’t really good, but I wonder who’s writing his contracts and whether he’s as casual about there [sic] wording as he is about the internet face he presents to the world?

That's Monty, hiding behind the kitchen bin. His sister, formerly (or formally?) Toutou, has been renamed Morgan. She doesn't seem to mind.

Why writers need help (and where to find some)

Back in the day, when I used to coach writers (before I discovered that coaching and writing were inimical, so if I coached, I didn’t write!) it came as no surprise to me that the main problems that writers had were not with their writing.

They thought they had writing problems, of course, or they wouldn’t have hired a writing coach, but what they had were the same, often apparently insuperable, meta-problems that send all kinds of people to all kinds of counselling. The only difference for them was that their performance anxiety was related to writing, not golf or passing their driving test or holding their marriage together.

And that’s why I was interested to receive a review copy of The Guide by Dr William Holden. Dr Holden has, amongst other things, been involved in sports performance coaching, and that’s an area from which I draw a lot of the techniques that I use in workshops with writers. Basically, these meta-problems usually relate to the way people see themselves (self-esteem) and they way they see the world (the Hobbesian view of it as being nasty and brutish tends to predominate) and I’m always looking for good books that explain where people are now, and show them how to get to where they’d rather be.

Seriously though, most self-help books absolutely stink. I think they stink for everybody because they are patronising and bland but they also stink particularly badly for writers because they are appallingly written tomes of turgid prose, packed with jargon and supposedly illuminated by bullet points but actually obfuscated by them.

As you can tell, my view of the self-help industry, as it presents itself between book covers, is pretty low. However, I was willing to give The Guide a read, and I was impressed by two simple innovations that make it a much more palatable tool. First, it neither seeks to seduce or exhort the reader, because it’s not about the reader, it’s about somebody else entirely. He's called Paul, and in following his journey we don’t get the finger-pointing that is such an unattractive feature of self-help books addressed to you, the reader (are you a woman who eats too much, are you a man without an emotional life? Why would anybody read further when addressed in such terms, I always wonder?) However, in learning what Paul learns, the reader gets plenty of opportunity to identify with his problems and understand the solutions.

Second, it’s a story! Wow! It’s not much of a story – it’s no epic saga of warriorhood, but it is actually a narrative, not a list of things to do to make yourself a better mother/lover/driver/salesman, and that makes it a much more enjoyable and attractive proposition for the reader to work through the book.

Of course, reading a book and putting what it tells in you into practice are two different processes, but my gut feeling is that Dr Holden has achieved what so many self-help authors never do; he’s applied his own principles to the book he’s written and achieved something quite outside, and quite beyond, the average.

There are things I would pick bones with: I hate the fact that the goal-setting section contains a template for the reader to use to write their goals, which drops the book back into the same morass as all the other self-help tomes; and I don’t buy into the mystic stuff at all, but I don’t have to, and you don’t have to, because it’s not necessary to believe in any of that stuff to gain the benefits of this well-explained and attractive guide to changing your thinking for the better.

Overall, if you’re going to buy a self-help book for Christmas, I’d say this one is the best I’ve read for a very long time, and it could even change your life ....

NaNoWriMo approaches …

Sadly I won’t be doing National Novel Writing Month this year, I’ve just got too much on. But I did complete it for four years and was Brighton (and Hove actually) coordinator for three of them.

If you want to write a novel but aren’t sure if you can, especially if you’ve become proficient at short fiction but keep falling down when you attempt the longer form, NaNoWriMo can be a fantastic way to develop the skills and techniques you need for novel-writing, at little cost. And local chapters (pun intended) make sure you have support and encouragment as you try to build your novel.

From 1 November you commit to writing at least 1666 words a day, every day, until 30 November. That gives you a 50,000 word narrative. It’s not exactly a novel, and it certainly won’t be pretty, but you learn a lot about plotting (or the lack of), character and world building, and bloody-minded determination along the way.

In the past I’ve used a number of incentives to get ‘my’ writers writing – one of my top tips to get through the task yourself is to become a coordinator as it forces you to deliver what you’re asking of others: there’s nothing like accountability to get those 1,666 words down on paper or screen. I’ve used threats, cajolery, tears and incentives to get Brighton’s writers to write with me! One of my favourite incentives was to get some T-shirts printed and give them out at the TGIO (thank god its over) party. One year I gave them to the fastest finishers, another I chose to reward the most wordy – doesn’t really matter, as long as people have a tiny tangible reward to aim for, as opposed to the big nebulous one of fame and fortune via publication, they perform much better. My printers are online T-shirt printing specialists: www.clothes2order.com and they will print as few as just one T-shirt (I generally get six) and their prices are great.

It’s a tiny outlay that can move people into productive writing, and I’ve always loved being a NaNoer … I shall really miss it this year, but I shall be cheering people on from the sidelines.

And I nearly forgot to say - I have an article about writing with a sense of place in November's Writer Magazine. You can buy it in Borders ...

... and, by request, kittens