Just Say No

Apparently, over eight million viewers tuned in to watch this week’s Question Time and the appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party. This is an unprecedented number, particularly at a time when the public’s appetite to hear politicians say anything about anything is at an all time low.

I watched it eagerly myself, though I’m not sure why.

Griffin sat like an over ripe Brie, all round, sweaty and unpalatable, while the politicians around him postured with a worthiness of a student union debate circa 1985. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.

Mr Griffin, it turns out, doesn’t much like Muslims, and gay people, and women. Oh, and journalists. He’s not very clever and isn’t an accomplished public speaker. I don’t agree with him, or anything he says.
But I already knew all that...

Of more interest and controversy were the arguments preceding the show and whether it should be aired at all.
The Welsh Secretary, Peter Haines voiced vociferous opposition to the BBC’s invitation to the BNP, as did Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Dear, the secretary of the National Union of Journalists. Griffin’s ideology, is so odious, the argument went, that the BBC should not be complicit in allowing him to publicise it.

The Beeb, however, stood firm, saying it was not for them to engage in censorship and the rest, as they say, is history, if not very historic.

The whole episode, however, has made me think very deeply about censorship generally. How, as writers we often hold a mirror up to society and what we reflect is not always very pretty. Sometimes we say things that people do not like or want to hear.

A quick goggle search reveals a host of books that have been banned at one time or another around the world. Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover are famous examples, but did you know Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was banned in 1930s China for portraying animals acting like humans.
In Lebanon, The Da Vinci Code remains unpublishable ( no cracks please ).

For me, the whole question arises as to who should judge these things and upon what basis. I am uncomfortable with the notion of a ‘someone’ who decides such things. Ken Livingstone accused Auntie of losing her ‘moral compass’ in giving Nick Griffin a platform but who are they or he to decide what the public can or can’t hear, can or can’t read?

The subject matter of my third book is honour killings and forced marriages, and as I began researching it I realised that if I were to write a real story, one true to my own vision, I would have to say some uncomfortable things that might upset some people. I discussed the matter at length with my editor but ultimately we agreed that I should hold up my own moral compass, no-one elses.

When the book comes out, readers can decide for themselves if what I say is the truth or if I have offended.

I suppose that’s the same argument used by the sweaty cheese-man himself.
But ya know what, people aint dumb. They can work stuff out for themselves.

Guest Blog by James Bennett - Sexuality & Fiction: Chains That Bind?

Does sexuality govern how we write? As writers, do our preferences enslave us?

Our desires bend us in certain ways and every experience spills onto the page, coloured by our own personal wants.

Dreams really do shape reality.

This question popped into my head while writing Unrequited, this notion that while I was writing something personal (and no doubt, unmarketable) in terms of gay relationships, it was, at heart, only an unveiling of experience. Perhaps that’s all writing is, coaxed and prodded to within an nth of the make-believe, that capricious landscape that we call Fiction. But all Fiction has its roots in Truth. Would I have written graphic gay sex scenes if I were straight?

Doubtful. Or so I thought at the time.

If art reflects life, then it might explain why the majority of mainstream novels deal largely with straight experiences. How we, as humans, are rarely drawn to desires beyond our own, but as writers, how frequently we plumb the depths of passions unknown. The girl who grows up dreaming of Prince Charming is unlikely to generate the passion to write an account of Cinderella falling for an Ugly Sister instead, amusing as that might be. It’s improbable that the boy who grows up fantasising about the cheerleading team will write a boy-meets-boy coming of age tale. Generally speaking, of course. If the biggest sexual organ is the brain, then that surely stems from the imagination. Sexuality influences, if not governs, the imagination. It seems obvious, at least on the surface, but like every question – and please remember, it is a question, always a question – there is often more to it than a yes or no answer.

The answer I’m giving here today is that I think the whole idea is a myth. We do what we do from desire, more so than from design. Desire is strong enough to surpass our biology, our genetic framework to create life, and defy any ‘moral’ upbringing. The heart goes where it wants to and we come to learn – hopefully – that everybody has a right to love. We may have no choice in those desires, but they do not chain us, any more than a writer’s preferences chains them.

In contemporary literature, the evidence is all there, from Annie Proulx’s At Close Range (that later became the landmark movie Brokeback Mountain) to the gay MC in China Mieville’s Iron Council and likewise in Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, brilliant books that transcend the concept of preference-specific literature, let alone genre. Novelist Anne Brooke does a fine line in leading gay men. I can’t speak for the experiences of these writers (although I’m pretty sure they’re all straight), but I can speak for the imagination.

As times change, so has sexuality in fiction. The imagination finds new and fertile ground to play with. The established order shakes. The walls are coming down.

And imagination? Well, we are only ever catching up with it, because imagination knows no bounds.

James Bennett is a British writer of dark fantasy and the occasional contemporary fable. The Lambda Literary Foundation (US) nominated Unrequited for Best Debut Novel in 2007 and he is currently working on a second book, a dark fantasy epic. This is his first guest blog. He thanks you for reading and welcomes your opinions.
For further info, please visit: www.freewebs.com/waxlyrikal

Forget Halloween - Writing is Far Scarier.

Why?


1) That first time you show your work to someone, breath held, eyes shut, heart knocking on your chest. Will they laugh? Smirk? Struggle to soften the blow that your work is rubbish? Be it a relative, friend, writing group or online acquaintance it takes guts to put your work out there. So, whatever the outcome, Congratulations! You’ve done the equivalent of opening your eyes in the dark.

2) That first time – lots of firsts here – you submit your story, be it one thousand or one hundred thousand words long. Why is this scary? Because the result more often than not will be a large brown envelope landing in your hall, bearing those brutal words Not for us. Yet you’ve confronted your fear, you’ve stepped well and truly into the aspiring writer’s Haunted House. One way out is the door of publication and to find this exit you must confront all manner of spooks – the dreaded synopsis, the hellish cover letter, the eternal rewrite, the shattered confidence… It takes a brave – some might say foolish person – to take this path.

3) Next you must hold your nerve and ride the two-faced ghost-train of success. You get an agent, get a contract and your day of publication arrives, yippee! But then, hello scary sales figures and alarming Amazon rankings and a devilish deadline for Book Two. And ultimately you must grapple that ghoulish question – will my contract be renewed?

4) It’s scary how writing stirs her cauldron and casts her spell on your once steady emotions. Now you feel intense envy at fellow authors who write more eloquently, get four book deals or meet Will Smith (you know who you are!) Tears are shed over rejection, high cackles let rip over positive–sounding emails or the production of an occasional bit of superb prose. Up and down, we are at the mercy of this literary mistress. Our happiness is no longer under our own control

5) The night-time terrors. Mine? They revolve around the thought that on my deathbed, I shall still be a struggling writer and a wail will escape my lips as I tot up all the hours I have pursued my self-indulgent dream, and realize that they would have been better spent achieving other things. Like getting fit. Like cooking my family nothing but home-made meals. I could have learnt to wind-surf or kept a tidier house. I could have done volumes of charity work or brought in more income. In other words… I have wasted my valuable time on this earth.


So why do we write? Is it a choice? Can we ever cast aside the demons of this pursuit? I have tried but its seductive song always lures me back, with the promise of great rewards…

Halloween isn’t scary, with its witches and zombies and ghosts. No, far scarier is being lucky enough to discover your calling, but not knowing if you will ever truly do it proud.

NANO-NANOOOO!

Today, winter officially begins. Evenings darken. It’s hibernation time, time to turn inwards. This week also marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month: when tens of thousands of would-be writers dedicate thirty days to the sustained act of writing a novel – or at least, 50,000 words of one. Whoever chose November for this mini-marathon of writing was inspired. What better time to go for it than in this dark and otherwise uninspiring month?

Maybe NaNo should be renamed NiNoWriMo (Nike Novel Writing Month) since the overarching theme is Just Do It. This is the bungee-jump method of writing. The pinch-your-nose and leap method. The kamikaze method. No safety net. No pause for thought. No gentle mulling and meandering. This is the apply-the-seat-of-your-pants-to-the-seat-of-a-chair and never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width method.

NaNoWriMo has been criticised as a waste of time, a method of producing only the requisite number of words, rather than anything worth keeping or using. I’ve never yet done it, but I have a sneaky feeling that its detractors may be wrong.

Practice may not always make perfect, but it certainly encourages flow. Like Morning Pages, NaNo may just be a great method for undermining the Inner Critic, for storming the fortress of I Can’t. NaNo is the Shitty First Draft. No-one expects anything other than shitty. Yet without that first draft, there’s nothing to work on.

As someone who is all too prone to procrastination, and who is incredibly anal in her writing (editing as I go and never feeling ready to progress until the last bit is ‘perfect’) maybe it’s time to get my running shoes on.

I’ve decided to give it a go. Not the official version, but my own private one, shared with a fellow writing friend. She has forty-thousand words to edit. I have forty-thousand words to write. We intend to Just Do It, and to support one another by weekly meetings and nightly phone calls. I know we will be in good company. Sebastian Faulks may not have done NaNo, but I suspect he understands the process and the point of it:

‘You give yourself six weeks. You write 2,000 words a day and that will give you the required length. Don’t stop. Don’t agonise. Don’t try to correct your prose as you go along. Don’t worry too much about the details. You can always revise them later…’

Good luck, all you official NaNos, and especially those Strictly writers and followers who are about to embark on this year’s adventure. This is one race that everyone can win.

Winner of Cally Taylor Prize Giveaway - Heaven Can Wait

Yikes! Nearly forgot about this, sorry guys - put it down to the hour change today!

Well done Debs Riccio, you are the winner of a signed copy of Cally's debut novel, Heaven Can Wait - please send me your details (click on my profile to email me).

Bad luck everyone else, but thanks for entering!

26/10 - Due to circumstances out of my control, a redraw was necessary and the winner is now Claire Moss - Claire, contact me!

The Ideal Reader - Guest post by Andrew Sharp

Andrew Sharp's wonderful debut novel, The Ghosts of Eden, a story of medicine, love and redemption set in East Africa, was published by Picnic earlier this year. Andrew trained as a surgeon and now practises as a GP in Leicester.His website is www.theghostsofeden.com.

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I have a notion that Wordsworth’s line, I wandered lonely as a cloud, has nothing to do with walking the Cumbrian hills but is a metaphor for the poet’s mental state when he wrote. Writers mooch lonely in their thoughts whilst under the tips of their fingers the novel forms and grows as they tap at the keys. Sometimes they think they have created fields of daffodils but even the prettiest words that appear on the screen have no guarantee of making it into the finished piece; at any moment they could be dragged and dropped, substituted or deleted, leaving not a trace.

But there comes a day when the writer has to say (like Pontius Pilate when asked to change what he’d written on Christ’s cross): ‘What I have written, I have written.’ No more revisions. The last pre-submission draft is printed out, is packaged up as if it's the stone on which is scoured the Ten Commandments, and sent to the publisher or agent.

Whilst the writer might have kidded themselves early on that they didn’t care if anyone else read their work, the truth is that a writer who doesn’t want to be read is like a composer who never dreams of having the Berliner Philharmoniker playing their work: they have a limited vision. However very few writers are happy to go in one step from a manuscript for their-eyes-only to a book open to the world. At some point in the late draft stage a writer starts thinking about their readers and - in Stephen King’s words from his entertaining book On Writing - wants someone around who’ll tell them, before they go out in public, that their fly’s unzipped.

What the writer would give their index finger for is an Ideal Reader. Someone who embodies the collective opinion of all the readers and reviewers of the world; someone who offers an unfailingly constructive and critical eye, pointing out what works and what should be deleted. For many writers, this is their agent, but it is ironic that when a writer most needs that Ideal Reader - for their first submitted manuscript – the agent is not available. How important this mythic figure can be is illustrated by the story of literary agent Charles Monteith who took a manuscript described as an ‘absurd & uninteresting fantasy …’ by a less visionary publisher's reader and provided William Golding with the editorial input that culminated in the finished novel: Lord of the Flies. (No pun intended with the close of the previous paragraph).

Inviting friends and family to comment might do wonders for a writer’s ego. They will make flattering remarks to avoid a lifelong rift (and because they are astonished to actually know someone who has written a book, however bad it is), but it’s hardly objective. The first reader feedback I received came in the form of, ‘Wow, Dad!’ as my youngest daughter ran her fingers across the top of the four hundred page high manuscript still hot from the laser printer. I guessed a publisher might be harder to impress.

There are critiquing services that will write a report for the writer in exchange for cash. Some will major on commenting on the marketability of your novel (let me save you the money: almost always the answer will be ‘unmarketable’ – gloom is programmed into the industry) and others will dissect, with surgical precision, the anatomy of the story itself but the truth is that even the most professional critiquing outfit can only afford to have one reader on the job and reading a novel is a highly subjective experience. After reporting competently on writing technique, plot credibility, characterisation etc the subjective element kicks in: what is Man Booker prize material for one reviewer will be shredder material for another. Several opinions that concur (as we say in medicine) are valuable, but would be prohibitively expensive if done through the critiquing service route.

Another route to pre-submission feedback is the writers’ group, either online or meeting face to face. Many writers find these disastrous. They're subjected to comments such as, ‘It’s kind of meaningful, I mean, I get the feeling that this is really heartfelt.' Some groups are let down by mutual back slapping or pseudo-intellectual point scoring. I’ve been fortunate. My group, the Leicester Writers’ Club, is as good as these get, although I nearly slunk out the back door on my first attendance.

I found myself sitting in a rather imposing hall gripping, unnecessarily tightly, four A4 sheets of paper. On the pages were a couple of thousand words from my recently completed debut novel. There were four rows of heads between myself and a wooden lectern which stood on its own at the front, the focal point of everyone’s gaze. By the lectern was an oversized microphone. It looked grand enough for an inauguration address. The chairperson was seated at a table, a little off to the side, looking extraordinarily intelligent and insightful. I could tell she’d be scornful of drivel. I convinced myself that the people sitting in front of me were all professors of English Literature or had written one of those books you see with titles like ‘the 1001 most common mistakes in fiction writing’. I hugely regretted putting my name down to read. I glanced down at my piece and convinced myself that the first paragraph was laughable.

The chair asked for announcements and acceptances. My perception that I was a tadpole in a pond of pikes was confirmed when someone announced that they had sold the German rights to their fourth novel. Then I heard, ‘We have a new member this evening ... who’s going to read for us.’ I found myself subconsciously screwing my pages into a tight ball. Why open myself to public humiliation?

After surviving the occasion it struck me that I had not been looking out on the literary equivalent of Dragon’s Den but was looking at a bunch of listeners/readers. Thirty willing, captive, readers. Where else could you find that for your draft manuscript? But it’s even better than that. The members of a good writers’ club are a very special type of reader. Because they’re writers, as well as readers, they’re well-versed in the techniques of the craft, and so are able to see why your favourite scene hasn’t worked and then suggest ways to make it work.

Even a good writers’ group has its limitations. In a meeting format where manuscripts are read out it’s only possible to get comment on a limited part of the novel and it’s difficult for the group to get a feel for the entire plot. There are, however, other benefits: it’s an environment to share knowledge of the writing and publishing world with fellow sufferers, to commiserate, encourage and to share in the joys of success. The group may not embody to perfection that elusive Ideal Reader but it’s good to feel that there is no need to do so much wandering lonely as a cloud.

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The Ghosts of Eden is available from Amazon.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

Grab yourself a bottle of cherry brandy, find a log fire, choose a cold, preferably snowy day to snuggle down with Death and the Penguin. It’ll soon be apparent why you need the cherry brandy, although Finlandia vodka would serve just as well. Put the kettle on and brew a large pot of coffee. You will need to drink plenty to keep up with the folk in this book. Are you ready for a charming experience?

That’s the word for it, and I have Susannah Rickards, erstwhile and sorely missed Strictly team member, to thank for the recommendation.

Viktor, a hapless writer of obelisks (obituaries) for Capital News is a charming fellow for a drink on a winter’s afternoon; Sonya, the four-year-old who drops into his life is charming too; Sergey, his militiaman friend is charming, and the penguin is super-charming. So often I don’t give a crust for any of the characters in the novels I read, but here’s A Group of Friends with which I’d happily share a cramped flat in Kiev.

Viktor and his pet penguin find themselves implicated in some nasty dealings without any intention or understanding on their part. Viktor’s philosophy when faced with this tricky situation is summed up as:

And life seemed easy and carefree, despite painful moments and less frequent scruples over his own part in an ugly business. But what, in an ugly world, was ugly? No more than a tiny part of an unknown evil existing generally, but not personally touching him and his little world. And not to be fully aware of his part in that ugly something was clearly a guarantee of the indestructibility of his world and its tranquillity.

Entering that little world and its tranquillity is the joy of this book. It’s a highly visual world, with all those tons of snow and bags of frozen fish and a penguin splashing in a cold bath – it’s easy to imagine that Kurkov writes screenplays.

This is a cosy read, an experience akin to sitting on a settee watching the television, something that Viktor and little Sonya spend plenty of time doing. Death and the Penguin offers the same warm indulgence as drinking coffee, or cherry brandy or sitting before a log fire. It’s for those who appreciate the simple comforts that life affords us in the intervals between the funerals. The other comfort is to have someone there, whether it’s the child watching television in the next room, the lover in the bed, the penguin standing mournfully in the corner of the room, or a stranger spotted across the pale moonlight, reading in one of the windows of the block opposite: a companion in misfortune.

But don’t let’s dwell too much on the melancholy. This book is also extremely witty. I’ve got my hand over my mouth to refrain from spoiling the fun – suffice it to say that Kurkov makes the most of the comic potential of a pet penguin and all that fish. And he does so by creating a gentle affectionate picture rather than showpiece gags. The effect is touching and uplifting without being sentimental. There’s even a short section from a new POV: Penguin’s Own View.

I was swept into the world that Viktor and his friends inhabit. Ultimately it’s a thriller, of sorts, and there’s plenty of impending threat to pull you through the story. It's also an absurdist take on existence amid the wholesale corruption and violent disregard for life in post-soviet Ukraine. I'm sure that some, reading my "cosy" comments above would say I missed the whole point of the book: the satire and the hardship and the disjointed relationships. So this is simply a personal impression from one reader. For me it was mainly fun and funny and the simple domestic scenes were the most fun: a vodka picnic on a frozen lake watching the penguin cavorting, or a New Year trip to a snowy dacha with kebabs barbecued and a tree in the garden with presents. I was in no rush to get to the action. And you don't need to analyse the politics. You can simply relish peeping through the frost covered windows into another world until you fall under the charm. Put this one in someone’s stocking and I promise they will thank you.