What a writer needs is …


Good question, isn’t it? Love, fame, chocolate, a good kick up the arse, a publication contract …?

Virginia Woolf famously said that a female writer needed money and a room of her own. In a provocative article Matt Shoard argues that discomfort in one’s living arrangements is more conducive to the great novel than the Hosking Trust offering of a rural idyll in which to write.

I am inclined to agree with him, but for different reasons. I spent a disproportionately painful part of my life running charitable trusts – I do believe being a bullfighter or a bailiff would have been less stressful and vicious, but that’s another story. Let’s just say that the disbursement of funds and the making of grants, the awarding of scholarships and the other bits of giving money to good causes was the dirtiest, most compromised part of the whole business.

It was never, ever, about the good cause. Never ever. It was about who’d got their way last time, or some new trustee who wanted to be noticed by launching a coup, or which special adviser or celeb endorser had a pet project that had to be funded or they’d huff off; it was all about which projects might get us column inches in the press and which – of course – ticked all the Charity Commission boxes that kept our charity status intact.

So when you let a committee of people who have spare time in the middle of the day make decisions about worth, you end up with a compromised set of agreements, based on horse-trading and pork barrel negotiations, that always reward the safe and sensible, not the dangerous and insane. These are nice people who do good things in warm rooms – they are not talent spotters. Talent spotters are generally chain-smoking despots with toxic personal lives and a completely unbending sense of what is good in their field. Talent spotters compromise like Vlad the Impaler did – ie they don’t.

If you want great literature to emerge from a rural idyll, go grab a random dub poet and force them to live in the worst web-fingered wilds of the country, with a sulky wood-burning stove and mad livestock for company. Don’t tell them they have to write to get out – just leave them there until they do. It may not turn out to be great literature, but duress, stress and anger are as likely to produce work of calibre as any committee-based judgement.

Mini book reviews:

Belle de Jour – the intimate adventures of a London call girl, published by Orion – I went back to this after the revelation of Belle’s real name. Still enjoyed it just as much the second time: zingy writing and a truly superb sense of pace make this autobiography a romp in both senses of the word – you emerge from it laughing and a little bit breathless. Best of the best in erotica, this one in my view.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Hammond – this is book club book this month, so I’ll report back on the group discussion next week.

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates – still reading this one. Whether you buy by subject matter (Marilyn Monroe) or by the inch, this book is BIG! I hope to have finished it in the next fortnight, but it’s not a book I want to rush, which gives you the hint that it’s quite a read, I hope.

The picture shows the Cream Tea cafe in Brighton, excellent hazelnut roulade, which is obviously what every writer REALLY needs!

Book Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness

This is one of those self-help books that masquerade as narrative. Reading back the sentence above, it sounds a little dismissive and it shouldn’t. Most people need help at differing points in their lives – fulfilling potential is rarely something that the average human achieves alone. Self-help books meet a real need and I’m in favour of people reading them, and taking what works from them. Flavouring self-help with the condiments of narrative is fine by me.

When it works.

Hmm. So to Hector. Actually, not to Hector. Let me tell you a story about Heloise.

Heloise is a psychiatrist. She’s good at her job, with a healthy practice and has a lover who’s a high-flyer in (oooh, let’s say finance) but Heloise realises most of her patients aren’t happy and sets out to discover why not. She visits a friend on another continent who turns out to be a Head Honchette in (oooh, let’s say advertising) and who’s rich and powerful but perhaps not very happy either. During this trip Heloise meets a man in a night-club and despite having a lover at home, spends a steamy night with him, only to discover the next day that Head Honchette hired this gigolo to show Heloise a good time. She’s a bit crushed by this, but can’t get Mr Gigolo out of her head because … well, he’s good at sex.

Heloise moves on, visiting another friend in another ountry where she finds herself in a top class hotel. In the bar she gets talking to a Big Bitch who is involved in some shady business (possibly drugs) and who reveals that Mr Big Bitch is suffering mental illness. Heloise – being in the mental illness business – checks out what Mr Big Bitch is being prescribed and realises it’s not doing the job for him, so gives Big Bitch advice on how to get the right drugs for the man at home.

At this point Heloise goes through a whole bunch of weird experiences, including being kidnapped, and ends up at the house of her friend again, where she very nearly falls into bed with another hot guy, related to her friend, but after a smooch session manages to restrain herself. After all, she’s got a man at home and a crush on Mr Gigolo, tongue-tangling with Hot Guy 3 seems to her to be as far as she should go. One of the things that gets her out of her kidnap situation is being able to throw Big Bitch’s name into the conversation, which gives her kidnappers the fear that BB will come and make their lives hell if anything happens to Heloise.

Skip on, skip on … Heloise learns all kinds of lessons about happiness and goes home, still half in love with Mr Gigolo. She doesn’t tell her lover about Mr G, nor about the tongue-tangling Hot Guy 3. She does use Head Honchette to get Mr Gigolo a real job where he doesn’t have to sell his bits for money. She settles down with her lover and starts a family.

Aw.

So … this psychiatrist sleeps around and doesn’t tell her partner (Safe sex? Honesty? The right to information before making a lifetime’s commitment?), she messes with somebody else’s patient at third hand by reviewing the man’s prescription WITH HIS WIFE and then suggesting WITHOUT MEETING HIM that he should be taking some other drugs (Right to self-determination? Privacy? Professional ethics? Professional courtesy? Fact-checking [maybe Big Bitch wants to kill off her man and is using Heloise as a patsy to get drugs that will do the job and make it look like suicide or overdose]?) and she hoiks a guy out of his lifestyle because she thinks it’s wrong for him, using the old girl network to turn his life into something that makes her feel happier about his situation – do I need to do the brackets here or can you work it out for yourself? Of course you can.

So … I couldn’t work out what made me uncomfortable about this book until I recast Hector as Heloise and his male friends as her female ones and then it became clear to me that what I was responding to was a high level of implicit sexism that allows Hector to mess in the lives of others: call girls, the wives of criminals he meets in bars; and to lie to others: his girlfriend back at home, with impunity. And when you swap the genders of all the characters in this little narrative it becomes clear (to me, maybe not to you, your mileage may vary) that this book is about patriarchy disguised as psychiatry – trust a man, he can put you right, even if he has to ignore your rights and abrogate his responsibilities to do it.

It's engagingly written and simple and easy to enjoy. But I’m not recommending this one. I liked the cover though.

Wishing I was eighteen again

Not because of the ‘rejection’ of not making the Sunday Times shortlist. Not even to relive my misspent youth, become a notorious tart and then write a book about it (see review of Belle de Jour later this week), but because I had lunch with Louise Halvardsson earlier in the week.

Lou’s one of the writers who really makes me step back and look at writing as a career, as a life-style choice, and as a challenge – whenever I sit down with her I come away with a new clarity about my own desire to write and the roots of the compulsion to produce fiction.

And on 15th March she’s leading a Creative Writing Workshop for Young Adults at Hove Library. You have to be 13-19 years old but you don’t need to have any particular writing skills or experience. Also, the workshop is absolutely free, but you do need to book a place in advance by ringing 01273 293312 or emailing pauline.freestone@brighton-hove.gov.uk

The workshop is part of Brighton & Hove's Aqua Festival which celebrates the hosting of the London 2012 Games and inspires people to join in and try something new. And I wish I could take part because I think it will be utterly brilliant …

Why success changes writers


Okay, first define success. Is it a success to have been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG competition? Shortlisted for the Willesden Herald when it was still a £5,000 prize? Runner up in the Guardian flash fiction comp which brought nothing but glory (and precious little of that)?

Yes. And I’ll tell you why. Because things change. That’s how you know something’s happened to you, or the world, or both. Example – of the nearly 200 emails I got (and if you’d told me beforehand that 200 people knew my email address I’d have laughed), at least a third were from folk I haven’t spoken to for over a decade, and a few were individuals I really hoped I’d never hear from again. Funnily enough, I got an email from a former neighbour who went to prison after the Willesden and one from a former schoolmate who went to prison after the Guardian. Wonder what recedivist crim is going to pitch up if I make the shortlist on Saturday?

And many emails, and some phone calls, asked questions I’d never been asked before. Not ‘do you have any photos of yourself as a model’ which was the only one I’d prepared for and was rather miffed about when it didn’t come up, but weird, complex writerly questions or simple, irreducible business questions. So I had to think differently about myself and the world, and that was dislocating. Dealing with those questions, being fair to good friends who deserved my time while also trying to be good to new contacts who deserved my respect and attention was knackering. I emailed the wonderful Hilary Mantel who understood exactly what I was talking about and didn’t remind me to write first thing in the morning, because I think she knew I knew that I should, and I think I knew that she knew I wasn’t. So I returned to the habit of writing as soon as I woke up and it did restore some proportion to the world. But it was just a bit debilitating to deal with so much ‘stuff’ and I wonder how serious writers with big reputations ever get anything done.

Of course it was great to be long-listed and I shall be gutted if I’m not short-listed - but only for about ten minutes. I’ve learned something interesting about the discipline of writing under even the mildest media awareness and let me tell you, it changes you, it does.

Mini Book Reviews:

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, published by Vintage Classics – book club loved this, apart from one person who found it a bit boring. We spent a lot of time talking about the quality and nature of Isherwood’s observations, the way he managed a combination of dispassion and wryness, and how the one or two times he slipped into emotional revelation (Sally’s departure, the likelihood of Rudi being tortured for his beliefs) were so much stronger for that quality of passive reporting. We talked a little about his homosexuality, quite a lot about the state of Germany at the period in which the stories are set and only fleetingly about Cabaret. Overall the club enjoyed the exposure to short stories, which delighted me, as a writer of short stories, and thought it would like to try a similar, thematically linked, collection again in future.

Learning to Talk, short stories by Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate. Loathed the cover of this one: a vase of daffs against a rainy windowpane seemed to me to be a cop-out of the worst kind, given that Hilary Mantel’s writing is the opposite of the kind of genteel, domestic drama that such a cover suggests (well that’s what it suggests to me, you may feel menaced by daffodils for all I know). These stories are generally of the kind labelled ‘coming of age’ although they are much more nuanced than such a label implies and they contain hints of the menacing figures that are to be so brilliantly realised in Beyond Black. Yes, I’m an unabashed fan, and I went to this short story collection because I wanted to be reminded what it means to be a writer of short fiction. I cannot recommend it too highly for craft, for emotional range, and for that peculiarly British ability to make the frightening ridiculous and the ridiculous truly terrifying.

As for the publisher that’s supposed to be sending a book for review – nothing yet!