Sex - or not - as the case may be

I've had that sniffy conversation again. The one where a 'real' writer turns to me and says, 'Don't you feel demeaned, writing erotica?'

Well no, actually. Let's see:

1 - It's fun
2 - It's lucrative
3 - I get to meet some wonderful people who take me for lunch at exciting restaurants
5 - I like sex, and I like writing about it.

And unlike you, oh miserably up-tight and reputation-conscious literary writer, I don't go to an office. I have no long and vile commute to endure. No boss makes my day miserable. I organise my own work and spend all day at home, wearing what I like, being polite to nobody (except the dogs, who expect it, being from Scotland), eating and drinking whatever and whenever and ... get this, by this means I not only have a great time I ALSO PAY THE BILLS.

Borges said, 'A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated'. Good enough for Borges, good enough for me. I'm not a proud writer. What I am is a humble and fully employed writer. If I get a second lifetime I'll worry about my reputation, until then I'm having fun, paying the mortgage and reminding myself that this is what pen names are for.

I feel better now.

And I shall be teaching my infamous course Writing about Sex which turns anybody into a professional, getting-paid-for-it, erotica writer, early next year, in a gorgeous venue in Brighton. Previous students have earned back their course fees with the sale of a SINGLE story written during the course, so it's actually a cost-free course, if you do everything I tell you (and why wouldn't you?). Let me know if you want details.

The Play Wot I Wrote

On Saturday we had a workshop with actors (real actors!) reading scenes from our plays. Having decided I was going to be sick with nerves I actually got up feeling fine, ate a huge breakfast and walked the dogs before heading off to Brighton for the readings - at which point all the anxiety I'd been blithely unaware of until that point came and hit me in my solar plexus and I had to get off the bus and walk, being grateful, for once, for the icy air that did a great deal to calm my nerves (and stomach).

What is it that causes such emotional trauma? I know that it's partly because I don't share anything except final drafts with anyone, and this was definitely not a final draft, it was barely even a first draft, given the compression required by the course deadlines, but there was more to it than that. I've been thinking about it, and reflecting on Simon Gray's excellent memoir The Year of the Jouncer, in which he talks about just this emotion. I conclude, on the evidence of a single sample, which any scientist will tell you is a lousy statistical approach, that it's got something to do with other people: having other people hear my work, having other people read my work. It's like dressing strangers in shoddy clothes that you know will fall apart in public.

Heigh ho. The actors were, to a man and woman, lovely. The plays were very good to magnificent (mine was first to be read and acceptable, rather than very good to magnificent, which I am happy to live with until I can revise it) and the process itself was so enlightening that my head filled with ideas and notes and thoughts and comments and I got a sort of mental indigestion, to go with the nausea, which made for a night of phantasmagoric nightmares.

I enjoyed writing my play, I loved the way the actors brought it to life, but I'm not sure I could cope with that kind of mental angst on a regular basis.

The proverbial adverbial

I nearly didn't get to blog today, because I've been wrestling with one of those weird little paradoxes that strike a writer from time to time - to whit, the adverb.

We are counselled, no exhorted, to remove this item from our writing. 'Don't do it,' we're told. Stephen King says 'The road to Hell is paved with adverbs' and yet ...

Why does this convention exist if it's not useful?

Today I discovered the answer.

It is useful, it's sometimes valuable, and it's essential to those writing fiction. But not stories. The place you cannot do without your actual adverb is in your play, specifically, your radio play.

For a play to work, the writer has to indicate to producor and actor what the tone of the dialogue should be - without that they must guess, and if they alter lines (often for good reason) the whole weight of the play can be tipped in the wrong direction if sensible adverbial instruction has been omitted.

As an example, I have a character who says I loathe Mozart. In fact he says, 'I loathe Mozart', which gives some idea of his state of mind, but when the directions say -

Henry: (drunkenly) I loathe Mozart.

A complete picture emerges. Henry is drunk, he may be talking complete bollocks, his emphasis is probably the result of having drink taken, not of a particularly strong prejudice because we all know that certain words, when we're drunk, can only be said with portentous gravitas and loathe is one such word. So in fact, Henry is an unreliable narrator at this point, and we understand all that through the skill of the actor and through the use of a single adverb.

But, you see, like most writers, I've trained myself to take the damned adverb out. So I spent all day flinching as I worked through the play I shall be work-shopping at the weekend, putting the hell-based paving back in. And that is why I nearly didn't blog today, she typed wearily.

I've received an award A Roar for Powerful Words, initiated by The Shameless Lions Writing Circle in recognition of powerful writing.

The kind nominator was Charles Lambert (I have no idea why my linky dink won't work here and I've given up trying to make it pretty - we're looking for powerful, right? Ugly is okay, as long as it's strong) which does give me another problem, beyond my coding failure, which is that Charles is one of the people I would have nominated myself, for such an award.

As well as coming up with five people I think should be honoured, I have to suggest three things that I think help make, or shape, powerful writing. That's not too difficult:

Honesty is essential. To communicate we have to tell our truth, by whatever means, and that means can be the 'muscular prose' of a Hemingway, or the allusive introspection of Proust. Truth emerges, without regard to style or voice, and the honest desire to tell an honest story nearly always wins through, even if the writing is ragged.

Love matters. You have to love writing like a drug or a newborn, to write with real power. Sometimes, it's true, you may hate writing like a bastard, but that's just the obverse side of the love coin. Wanting to be a writer is not enough, you have to love the words for their own sake.

Knowing your place is essential. Those who just want to 'tell' without listening run dry pretty fast, and produce weak stuff anyway. You have to want to read, as well as write, and you have to experience the written word (whether yours or anothers) with a critically loving spirit - the history of fiction, poetry or journalism that allows us to stand where we do isn't just essential background reading, it's the bedrock of our experience. If we don't know what we're standing on, we can't reach higher.

My nominations?


Bunny Goodjohn
Bunny's first novel 'Sticklebacks and Snowglobes' is out now - she's one of my best friends, and a brilliant writer and we met in a writing workshop. She's also my toughest critic and my touchstone for truth and her blog deals with the daily nitty gritty of writing life.

Cliff Garstang
I don't always understand Cliff's blog, and that could be because it's 'postgraduate' level, while mine is only 'elementary school' (you can find out what that means at Perpetual Folly) but I learn from it whether I understand or not. Incisive reviews, commentary and frequent revelatory insights into how one writer writes.

Sandra Scoppettone
Long ago, before I ever thought of writing fiction, I read Sandra's books and loved them. One day I found her blog and dared to post a comment. Since then she's been a personal support, and an inspiration - her truth is told in her blog with unflinching honesty - it's not just an exploration not just of how and why one writer writes (or doesn't) but Sandra shares her past in the writing business and tells of her experiences in ways that we can all learn from. I can't praise her too highly, as a writer or as a generous soul.

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog

What I said about the love of words is proved here. For the sheer joy of it, for the glory of Middle English and because Chaucer is a god, this blog always makes me smile, shake my head in wonder and get back to work with a renewed delight in placing word in front of word. Can I recommend one particular post to you? Serpentes on a Shippe is the most sublime piece of homage you will ever read. Chaucer would have loved it!

A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
J A Konrath is a genre writer, and his blog tells you what you need to know if you want to make a living out of writing fiction. Read it - if it puts you off the business forever, then good. If it doesn't then join the rest of us who are getting out there and doing it.

What has Steve Vai’s guitar playing got to do with a man trying to have sex with a bicycle?


Well, to begin with, they were both drawn to my attention in the same week. The former, by my teenage son, the latter by blogger Steve Kane (http://.www.steve-kane.co.uk/blog/blog.htm) to whom I am indebted.

As I began to watch Vai on YouTube, I realised I did know who he was. I’d seen him before, and then, as now, he made me uneasy. He was Frank Zappa’s guitarist if you’re still trying to place him (of course, I hear you say, how silly of me to have forgotten that Vai was Zappa’s guitarist, how did it slip my mind?) and he is a man who makes seven strings produce the most ethereal music ever. Yes, seven. That’s the musical equivalent of writing a best-selling vampire novel – in blank verse.

Anyway, Vai and his guitar: go and have a look, especially the video of Tender Surrender. Creepy. This is not just a man posturing, this is a man REALLY making love to his guitar. It’s not just about what the guitar can do for him, but about what he is doing for the guitar, right there on the screen. Audience doesn’t matter to Vai; he’s neither particularly an exhibitionist nor particularly not – because anything beyond him and the chunk of wood, metal and cables that hugs his groin is irrelevant. I find it quite horrible to watch.

The word communion is over-used and has been taken hostage by the most bigoted section of the Christian ‘community’ as a tool with which to beat to a bloody pulp anybody whose sexuality is considered threatening. Nonetheless, communion is the only word I can find to fit Vai and his guitar. They are intercommunicating on a level that excludes any other participant, forcing the viewer to become voyeur.

This, presumably, is what the sad creature (although why should he be sad? Perhaps he’s a jubilant bike-fucker?) in the hotel room with the bicycle was striving for.

And it’s what I get, and assume any other writer gets, just often enough to keep me writing, through all the dross, the rejections, the revision, the failures, the cost that is never matched by income, for the few minutes when the intercommunication becomes communion and you can’t tell if you are writing or being written, playing or being played, lover … or bicycle.



Thanks to anonymouscollectiveme for the sexy bike photo, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

Better

It is better to have dial-up than nothing, but better still to have broadband! Which, somewhat precariously, I do have again.

On the plus side, the loss of internet access for six days means that I now sit down at my computer with a small pean of praise ringing in my head for the joy of instant internet connections and fast download times. On the minus side I was amazed to find how much time I must waste on Facebook and Goodreads and checking my emails and so on. I kid myself that all this is research time, but it's not. I produced nearly twice the normal volume of words when those distractions were removed from me.

Even so, I'm not going to find an attic to work in. Life is for living, not suffering, and I love being able to look at Lolcats while I'm wrestling with abstruse problems like whether it is better to say 'he sank' or 'he descended' when writing about a pearl diver. I adore my email and the constant communication from other writers - sometimes it's all that keeps me going, and their experiences, comments and support are invaluable. So despite the shock of realising that I'm an idle bugger quite a lot of the time, no new resolutions here.

Normal service

Will be resumed - when Orange actually get off their fat backsides and send me the new livebox I need. Until then, dear and sadly missed readers, I not only lack internet access but even email ... so think of me sitting in the library (thank all Gods for governemnt open access policies or I wouldn't have even this meagre chance to log on) for an hour a day, trying to do everything I need to with a bunch of toddlers being read a story right behind me!

But the good news is, my NaNo word count is a stunning 28753.

Veneration or idolatry?

Books. I've said before that I love them, and I'm suspicious of writers who don't read a lot (a lot for them, for some people that's twelve books a year, for others three hundred) but I don't get book idolatry.

For me it's the content, not the object, that matters. Most of my books are paperbacks because they are easier to transport and all the good ones have notes in them. My notes. Scribbed in margins.

They have pages turned down, highlighting, bookmarks - you name it, I've found a way to deface the pristine page.

Why?

Because I'm a writer. Because thoughts, ideas, comments, questions, strike me as I read and where should I record them? In the book that inspired them, of course. Where else?

Lots of people seem to think books should be treated like relics and I just don't get it! First, I believe that my ideas are as important (to me) as those of the published writer I'm reading and second because I'm engaged in a conversation with that book: an interrogation or commentary, and I want my responses to be right there alongside what prompted them. Third, I can always find my fleeting inspirations - they're in the place that gave them birth.

My Terry Pratchett's, for example, are so annotated they can barely be read by anybody except me. My copy of Treasure Island (first read age 8, then 11, then just about every year since) is cross-referenced to a history of Samoa and a biography of Fanny Stevenson, Robert Louis's wife, so that reading one leads me to a section of another and back again. Why not? Does the author know or mind? No. But do I feel each reading reinforces and reinforms my own writing, yes I do.

So do you idolise your books, or venerate them enough to want to mark them up?

And yes, I am nanowrimo this year, but everybody will be writing about National Novel Writing Month as it starts today and I thought I'd do something different ...