Scenes from a novel

It would be nice to be able to say that the reason I haven’t written anything on this blog for the best part of a year was that I’ve been too busy writing a novel. Nice, but not strictly true. As I’ve doubtless written before, it’s more a case of life getting in the way – work mainly.

But more recently, I have been working on a novel (my fourth, in case anyone’s counting), one that I started way back in 2010, and that I’m determined to finish this year. Finish a first draft, I mean – let’s not go crazy.

The reason I’ve been able to pick up where I left off after a prolonged period when I did no work at all on the novel is the software I’m using to write it. It’s called StoryMill, and I can highly recommend it. (And no, I’m not receiving any enticement to endorse it.)

I wrote my first three novels using basic word-processing software (Word, mainly), but when I started this one, I did some research to see if a package designed for writers might suit my way of working. StoryMill fits well with my methodical mindset, with the capacity to create, sort and label characters, chapters and scenes.

It’s this last feature that I’ve found most useful. I’ve always thought of my plots in terms of a succession of key scenes, linked together with whatever is needed for the flow of the story – exposition, interior monologue, narrative links and so on. With StoryMill, I started by creating the scenes I knew I wanted to include, playing around with the order and then piecing them together to create chapters. Each scene includes a ‘Notes’ tab and a ‘Text’ tab, so it’s easy to leave reminders for yourself of what you intended the scene to consist of.

As of today, my menu includes 42 scenes, of which I’ve written 31 and assigned 26 to chapters. This feels as if speeds up my progress; there will be chapters where I can simply slot in pre-written scenes and add any necessary linking text.

The real beauty of this, for me, is that it mitigates against writer’s block. If I reach a point in the narrative where I’m not sure how to proceed, I simply skip ahead and write a scene from further on where I do have a clear idea of what I want to achieve. To kickstart my writing in the past couple of months, I’ve taken a sub-plot and followed it through to its conclusion; I’ll decide as I go along where the scenes that make up this sub-plot fit in the bigger narrative.

None of this would be impossible using ordinary word-processing software, of course, but it would be more cumbersome, requiring much annotation and cutting and pasting of text. StoryMill simplifies the process, and I find it very satisfying to use.

To rave all night and to surf all year

“All my friends said ‘I wish that I was you’
They don’t say that any more”

Years ago, I spent a Bank Holiday weekend in the West Country with my best friend and his wife. It was a year or so after their wedding, at which I’d developed a bit of a crush on one of the bridesmaids, and we spend an idyllic afternoon at the cottage where she was living a bohemian existence in a tiny village in Somerset.

Sitting there in the sunshine in her garden, surrounded by flowers and artsy knick-knacks, I had a brief glimpse of an alternative life. How would it be if I chucked in my dull job in London and came down here to live with her? She would paint and I would write, and we would drink in country pubs and go on long walks and be part of an artistic community…

All complete fantasy, of course, not least because she already had a boyfriend and didn’t give me a second glance. At the end of the weekend I returned to London and my workaday existence. But the memory of that afternoon has always stayed with me, and it’s what I think of now when I listen to my favourite song of the past year, ‘Crackington’ by Police Dog Hogan.

The song (which you can find on their 2014 album, Westward Ho!) takes a similar scenario to the one I fantasised about all those years ago and follows it through to its (logical?) conclusion. The narrator has given up his job, bought a van and a surfboard, and moved to the Cornish village of Crackington, but it’s safe to say it hasn’t worked out.

The opening line finds him sitting, hungover, on the cliffs, “smoking a spliff through red wine lips”, watching kids surfing far below, and the lyric goes on to paint an impressionistic picture of a life of boozing and failed relationships. What first attracted me to the song was a clever rhyme near the end; “Spent a night in my car with/a girl from Trebarwith/and never saw either again”, and the song has some fun with Cornish place names. (Though I confess that I had to use Google to find out why “Got slated in Delabole” is funny.)

But after a few listens, it was the melancholy that underpins the song that grabbed me, propelled onwards by the banjo-driven, folksy lilt of the tune. The killer line, almost hidden in the middle of the song, is: “Now I’m too old to go back again/I’m too old to stay here”.

The song suggests that maybe it’s best if fantasies of escape remain just that – fantasies. And if I ever find myself daydreaming about my alternative, bohemian life with Jane in Somerset, I will listen again to ‘Crackington’ and count my blessings.

Revived parrot sketch

For years, I never reread books. Partly it was a reaction of years of studying, when I had to slog my way through set texts several times in preparation for exams. There was also the persistent feeling that there were too many exciting new books to read, leaving no time for going back over old ground.

Finally, a few years ago, I grudgingly accepted that I was never going to get around to reading all the novels on the Booker prize (or whatever it’s called these days) shortlist, all the ‘recommended reads’, the complete works of every author I liked. That being the case, why not occasionally revisit novels that had made a great impression on me when I was younger and see what I made of them now?

I’m not one of those readers with a photographic memory for plots, characters and incidents. For the most part, what stays with me after reading a novel is a single overriding impression; of the book’s tone or atmosphere, of an aspect of the plot or its narrative style. And what I’ve generally found from my rereading to date is that these impressions are more akin to false memories.

Take The Great Gatsby. I studied Fitzgerald’s classic for my A levels, and I’ve seen two different film versions, so I ought to be fairly familiar with the text. But the thing that had stuck with me through the years was a sense of mystery: I ‘remembered’ that the story hinged on the question of who Gatsby was and where he’d come from.

On rereading it, I discovered that this question is answered, comprehensively and unambiguously, about two-thirds of the way through. That doesn’t necessarily diminish the power of the novel, but it changes the nature of that power.

Another example is Graham Swift’s Waterland, which I read during the summer before my final year at college, and instantly elevated into my all-time top 10. For those who don’t know it, it’s one of those stories that flashes back and forth between the present and the past – in this case, the Fens in the 1940s, when the narrator was growing up.

It was this aspect of the novel that remained in my memory long after I’d read it, so that I assumed it made up the bulk of the narrative. Not a bit of it: when I reread Waterland, I found myself ploughing through lengthy (and comparatively tedious) sections set in the present day, when the narrator is a history teacher in a London comprehensive school, and getting increasingly irritated because I wanted to get back to the Fens.

The latest novel I’ve revisited is Flaubert’s Parrot, which I was surprised to find I own a signed copy of. (I have a feeling Julian Barnes came to the literary society I occasionally attended at Cambridge, and it must have happened then.) I certainly admired the novel, which I remembered as a frothy, playful confection, a post-modern literary game of the type that was fashionable in the 1980s.

Well, I wasn’t completely wrong. Flaubert’s Parrot is certainly playful in places – I particularly like the chapter framed as a mock exam (“Marks will be deducted for facetious or conceitedly brief answers.”) But it’s also a weighty work of disguised literary criticism which poses serious questions about writers and writing, and about life and living. 

I’m still not sure that the central conceit works; that the novel’s ruminations on the life and works of Gustave Flaubert are the work of an amateur scholar who is trying to avoid dwelling on the suicide of his wife. There’s so little space devoted to this aspect of the ‘plot’ that it risks the reader forgetting about it altogether. But even here, there is poignancy, given that Barnes’ most recent book is a memoir describing his grief at the loss of his wife. (Another one for the reading list.) Of all the books I’ve reread in recent years, this is the one I’m certain I’ll come back to again in another 20 years or so.

Hearing difficulties

I’ve been listening to music for 40-odd years now. Ask anyone who knows me what my favourite activities are, and they’ll put ‘listening to music’ high on the list. But it’s only recently that I’ve realised that, despite all those years of practice, I’m actually rubbish at it.

Thinking back, the clues were there at school. In music lessons, the teacher would put a record on the turntable – something by Beethoven or Britten, say – and tell us to listen to it so that we could discuss it afterwards. You then had three choices. You could look around the classroom while the music was playing, but you risked being distracted by your classmates who were doing the same, some of them doubtless up to something they shouldn’t have been, like flicking bits of rolled-up paper at each other or trying to write in chalk on the blazer of the boy in front without them noticing. You could stare out of the window instead, but again, there’d be something going on which would catch your eye. Or you could just rest your head on your folded arms, close your eyes and absorb the music – and risk nodding off. I usually favoured the latter method, but it didn’t really work. Even if I didn’t fall asleep, my thoughts would soon turn away from the music onto something else entirely.

And it’s been the same ever since. Essentially, I am incapable of simply listening to music. I can sit in a chair, will myself to concentrate – and within a couple of minutes, my mind will be somewhere else entirely and the music will have passed me by.

So the answer is to do something else while listening, obviously. Except that if it’s anything that requires any mental activity, that automatically shuts down the part of my brain that’s in charge of listening. If I’m reading, surfing the web, doing a crossword, whatever, there’s no point even putting a CD on; it really will go in one ear and out the other.

The best solution I’ve found is to occupy myself with something that requires minimal brainpower. Mindless computer games (the kind that involve clicking on brightly coloured shapes) are good. So is ironing, though it’s not something I do a lot of. Driving isn’t bad (which is a bit worrying, when you think about it), though for some reason I prefer to listen to people talking when I’m in the car these days.

Part of the problem, I think, is the way my brain is wired. It favours activities that involve the eyes, particularly reading. Even when I’m just listening to someone talking, I sometimes catch myself looking round the room for visual stimulation, rather than focusing 100% on what they’re saying.

So it seems that I’m simply not a good listener, in any sense of the term. Whether that’s genetic, or something that developed while I was growing up, I can’t say. It is a bit of a paradox for someone who loves music, though, isn’t it?

Always the traffic, always the lights

“I opened a notebook, it read ‘The Darlinghurst Years’
I snapped it shut, but out jumped some tears”

So begins the song that I’ve been mildly obsessed with recently, ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, from the Go-Betweens’ final album, Oceans Apart, released in 2005. It’s one of those songs that only reveals its mysteries gradually, over repeated listens.

As the opening lines suggest, Robert Forster’s lyric is an (autobiographical?) exercise in nostalgia, looking back to his student days, or maybe just afterwards, living in a shared house where “people came and went”. But rather than a straight narrative, the song is a series of disjointed memories, deeply personal. He remembers “gut rot cappucino, gut rot spaghetti”, and the exaggerated way he pronounces the last syllable, to rhyme with ‘say’, suggests a private joke.

There’s more obvious humour, too, in the way he takes the mickey out of his ambitious, and quite possibly pretentious, former self. “I’m going to change my appearance every day/ I’m going to write a movie and then I’m going to star in a play,” he sings. I remember people like that at college.

As for the music, it starts with a strummed acoustic guitar, then builds slowly after the first verse to incorporate electric guitar and drums as the rhythm gradually becomes more insistent. But what I really love about it is the brass section that you start to notice in the background from about two minutes in, and that slowly becomes more prominent until it dominates the last couple of minutes, like a mutant New Orleans jazz band freeforming over Forster as he repeats the song’s refrain, “Always the traffic, always the lights” until the fade.

Why a horn section? A less imaginative band would have used strings, both because they’re the classic signifier of nostalgia, and because the lyric repeats the line “Joe played the cello through those Darlinghurst nights”. But the horns contribute perfectly to the weird, skewed atmosphere of the song, adding an extra layer of mystery.

Like I say, I love the fact that Forster makes you work to get into the song, and leaves so much unresolved. Above all, I still can’t decide if the tears that jump out are tears of joy or sadness. I think I’ll just go back and listen one more time...

All change!

When I started this blog in 2009, it was essentially a marketing exercise. The conventional wisdom was that self-published authors like me needed to find ways to connect with potential readers, and the internet was the perfect vehicle for this.

So I started a blog in which I would write about my novel, First Time I Met The Blues, and matters relating to it; places and people who had inspired it, the blues music which forms the basis of my characters’ journey, the process of self-publishing, other writing projects and so on.

Four years on, that flame has pretty much burnt itself out. My full-time job has taken precedence over my part-time writing to such an extent that I’ve had less and less to write about, and less time in which to write about it. From a peak of 26 posts in 2010 (that’s one a fortnight, on average), my output dwindled to 12 posts in 2011 and just 6 in 2012. This is only my second post of 2013.

But I still want to keep the blog going, and I’m finally finding the time to make progress with my fourth novel, so I’ve decided to tweak my editorial policy. From now, I’ll be writing about music in general, and books in general, as well as my own writing and anything else that takes my fancy. It’s not a complete change of direction – I’m not going to start blogging about politics, or ranting about the public transport system – more of a broadening out of the original themes. At the same time, I may play around with the look and feel of the blog, to reflect the change of emphasis. Stay tuned…

An Olympian effort

I’m not sure what the ethics are of reviewing a book that you’ve contributed to, but what the hell – I’m going to anyway. Besides, my contribution to From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea amounts to two pages out of 200, so I reckon I can still be reasonably objective.

FTSOOTTBOTL (as no one is calling it) is the first book from the team behind the late lamented Smoke: A London Peculiar, a lovingly produced magazine that was effectively a fanzine for London. It stopped publishing a couple of years ago, but lives on as a website, and this is the first of what will hopefully be a series of books.

The subject, in case you hadn’t guessed, is last year’s Olympics, as seen through the Smoke prism; that is, tangentially, quirkily, occasionally movingly, but usually with a certain wry humour. Contributions include short stories, autobiographical snippets, reportage, poetry, cartoons, photography and unclassifiable snippets of silliness. (Special plaudits for the footnotes, by the way, which are simultaneously useful and splendidly daft.) None lasts more than a few pages.

This isn’t a book about the Games, as such: it’s a compendium of Londoners’ reactions to hosting the event, starting with the award of the Olympics in 2005 and ending in late 2012. The Games themselves don’t feature a great deal, so if you want to read about running and swimming and stuff, this isn’t the book for you.

Certain themes recur. The early section of the book is heavy with a bittersweet nostalgia for the area of East London that had to be razed in order to create the Olympic Park, however rough and down-at-heel it may have been. Co-editor Matt Haynes lives in Greenwich, so there’s a lot of material (possibly a tad too much) about the disruption caused by staging the equestrian events in this genteel village, and the outrage felt by the locals at the prospect of horses churning up the grass in their park. Later, there are various musings on the cultural collisions between Londoners and the influx of foreign athletes and spectators. If there is an overall theme, it is that of habitually cynical Londoners learning to relax and enjoy the spectacle.

Matt and his fellow editor, Jude Rogers, wrote a sizable proportion of the pieces, which does occasionally make it feel like a vanity project. Then again, they were probably short of suitable contributions – which might explain why they included mine, an autobiographical sketch with only the most tangential connection to the Olympics. No matter; I’m glad they did, and honoured to be part of such an unusual, and enjoyable, anthology.

To find out how to get hold of a copy, click here. You won’t regret it.

Now here’s a funny thing

My friend Paul has taken to telling me off for putting ‘sad bits’ in my novels. Why don’t you just write out-and-out comedies, he says. You’re very funny. I try to explain that life encompasses tragedy and farce and all points in between, and that I want my stories to do the same, but to no avail. He just wants me to make him laugh.

I take it as a compliment that Paul believes me capable of writing comic novels, but I think he underestimates the difficulty of the task. Very few authors manage it successfully. Here’s my personal top five (in reverse order, naturally).

5) Tom Sharpe

Like many people, I suspect, I discovered Sharpe’s scabrous novels in my late teens and used them as light relief during my A-levels and beyond. Sharpe’s comedy is propelled by a righteous fury at the idiocies (and worse) of the world, and his best books (the two set in South Africa spring to mind) are satirical masterpieces.

Recommended reading: Indecent Exposure

4) Douglas Adams

Another favourite from my schooldays and student years. True, the Hitchhikers’ Guide… series ran out of steam by the end, but the first three books are glorious, full of clever ideas brilliantly realised. One of those authors who managed to plant ideas in the heads of a generation – not least the answer to the ultimate question about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Recommended reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

3) Jerome K Jerome

The Edwardian era may be the golden age of English comic writing, and the oddly-named Jerome was its master. There is (gentle) satire in his work, but mainly he created funny situations for his characters to bumble through. Ignore the over-rated Three Men in a Boat, which is too sentimental for my taste, and start with its sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, in which the hapless trio go on a bicycle tour of Germany. I’ve read it more times than any other book I own.

Recommended reading: Three Men on the Bummel

2) Matt Beaumont

I’m not entirely sure Beaumont belongs in this list, as some of his more recent books have moved away from out-and-out comedy. But at his funniest, he is the most hilarious writer of the modern age, and the way he uses contemporary communications to send up his stupid, venal characters is genius. e is told entirely in emails, and in its successor, e squared, he broadens his palate to take in instant messaging, Twitter, texting and more. It’s one of those ideas other authors must have kicked themselves for not thinking of first.

Recommended reading: e squared

1) PG Wodehouse

Who else could be number one? The undisputed master of comic writing, the man who created a wonderful, unchanging world of his own where (let’s be honest), we’d all like to live, despite the fierce aunts and intractable romantic complications. There is satire in Wodehouse’s work (Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts is a delicious send-up of Oswald Mosley), but most of the humour is gentle, and all the better for it.

Recommended reading: anything, really – but Summer Lightning is a great introduction to the Blandings series, usually overshadowed by the Jeeves stories

A brief commercial break

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve contributed to an anthology of new writing about Watford FC, edited by Lionel Birnie and called Tales from the Vicarage. It’s out later this month, but it’s available to pre-order now. You can read full details here, including a list of the contributors and a summary of each chapter.

It’ll be the first (and almost certainly the last) time I’ve ever appeared in print alongside an England international, and I’m really looking forward to reading his and the other contributions.

Bits and pieces

It appears that I haven’t posted anything here for three months, which is a bit of a shock to me – especially since ‘Write blog entry’ appears on my to-do list every week.

It’s a reflection of the fact that work has taken up an increasing amount of my time and – equally significantly – energy in recent months. As a result, I haven’t done a great deal of creative writing, and my new novel has stalled at chapter 7.

I will get back to it in due course, but in the meantime I have got a couple of things coming out this autumn. One is a contribution to an anthology of new writing about Watford FC that will be published at the start of the new season. It’s an extension of the sort of thing I write on my other blog, but much longer  – around 5,000 words – and more nakedly autobiographical. I’ll be interested to see how it fits in with the other pieces in the book.

The other is much shorter – a song which will appear on the new album by Blue Angel in the autumn. As I wrote last year, my friend Jason suggested I try writing some lyrics for him to put to music for a solo project he was working on. He also sent me a tune with a title but no words, and asked if I could supply something suitable. I took his title (‘The colour of summer’) and ran with it, and it’s this song that he and his collaborators have recorded for the Blue Angel album. I can’t wait to hear it.

More details on both projects when I have them.

It’s in the trees

This time last week, I spent much of the morning queueing at my local Royal Mail sorting office to pick up a package the postman hadn’t been able to fit through the letterbox. It was worth the wait, though, as the package included a shiny new copy of Even More Rock Family Trees by Pete Frame.

Literary heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and even though he deals exclusively in facts rather than fiction, Frame is one of mine. I first discovered his work just after I’d left school, and during a long, lonely summer spent working in a factory in Germany, his first book of rock family trees was a constant companion. I would spent hours poring over the minutiae of bands’ careers, tracing the developments of famous (and not so famous) musicians’ careers. The accompanying text was every bit as engrossing, a winning blend of fact, anecdote and opinion. Last, but not least, Frame’s family trees are works of art, hand-drawn and carefully planned to make even the most convoluted genealogy comprehensible. Thirty years after I first encountered them, I still find them as fascinating as ever. (If you want to find out more, check out the Family of Rock website.)

The stories I’d read in Frame’s books of rock family trees over the years (the latest is his fifth), particularly those dealing with the British Blues Boom of the 60s, were one of the key influences that fed into the plot of First Time I Met The Blues. Indeed, towards the end of planning the novel, I drew up a rudimentary family tree for The Hornets, to get a better sense of how the peripheral characters around the band fitted in. In my fantasies, when the book is picked up by a major publisher, I’ll commission Frame himself to create a proper family tree that can be included in the hardback edition. Hey, it could happen.

The dying art of editing

Do publishers not bother editing books any more? And do authors not take the trouble to check their work before they deliver their work to the publisher?

I ask because I’m spotting more and more errors in published works – both novels and work of non-fiction – and it really annoys me. I’m not talking about typos necessarily (though they’re not unknown), but about errors in punctuation or syntax, or simply instances of bad writing that should have been eradicated, either by the author or their editor, before the book was printed.

Take the opening sentence of William Boyd’s ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’. It’s a superb novel, one of the best I read last year, but it starts unpromisingly:

“Let us start with the river – all things begin with the river and we shall probably end there, no doubt – but let’s wait and see how we go.”

That contradiction in the section between the dashes, between ‘probably’ and ‘no doubt’, pulls you up short. Any decent writer (and Boyd is a great deal better than decent) ought to have spotted it when they read through their draft, and deleted one or the other; it’s what authors do. So did Boyd not check his work? And did Bloomsbury not edit it when he delivered the novel to them?

I’ve just finished reading another excellent book, ‘The Champion’ by Tim Binding, and it contains a classic example of the kind of sloppiness I’m talking about. The narrator, an accountant, discovers that a builder hired by his employer is taking liberties with his bills. On page 304, the builder is referred to as Paul Langley. Two paragraphs later he’s become Lumley, then four lines after that he’s Langley again. Further down the same paragraph he’s still Langley, then he’s back to being Lumley. Two pages later, just to confirm the error, he’s referred to as Paul Lumley.

You can see how it happened, of course. Somewhere in the process of writing the book, Binding decided the builder should be called Lumley rather than Langley (or vice versa), but he didn’t do a very thorough job of making the change. And, once again, neither he nor his editor at Macmillan proofed the typescript thoroughly enough before publication to spot and amend the error.

Does any of this matter? It does to me. A good novel immerses you in its world, and anything that jars when you’re reading risks breaking that spell. Good writing is writing that you don’t notice – and I, for one, notice errors.

The young ones

Having written a novel about a fictional blues band, I invariably find that when I go to a gig, I end up mentally comparing my invention with the real thing, to see how accurate my imagination was.

Last night I went to The Half Moon in Putney to see Nine Below Zero, expecting to see a band at much the same stage of their career as The Hornets in the later chapters of First Time I Met The Blues. I wasn’t disappointed – and NBZ were excellent. What I didn’t expect was to discover another band right at the start of their journey.

My friend Chris and I were catching up on each other’s news and barely noticed the support act (The Aaron Keylock Blues Band) take to the stage. We just had time to register that the trio (guitar/bass/drums) appeared to be in their early teens before they launched into a hard and heavy blues instrumental. All around us, jaws dropped. This was seriously good.

Aaron himself, the singer and guitarist, is a diminutive boy whose shoulder-length hair and check shirt bring to mind a young Rory Gallagher. But I doubt that Gallagher was this good at the age of 14. Aaron can play fast, intricate solos and slow-burning blues that build to a climax, he can play slide guitar, he writes his own songs – he’s even managed to become jaded with the biz already, earnestly introducing one song with the deathless line, “This is about the music industry.” The one thing he can’t do very well right now is sing, mainly because his voice sounds like it’s in the process of breaking.

So how do they compare with my fictional Hornets? I must admit that my imagination didn’t stretch to making a bunch of lads in their early teens quite as skilful and polished as Aaron and co. Des, the Hornets’ leader, is certainly talented and pretty sure of himself, but I never pictured him as being that good – and he’s already older at the start of the story than Aaron is now. It’s quite mind-boggling, really. Check him out for yourself if you don’t believe me.

The gig did confirm one thing I got right, though. I wanted the book to demonstrate that there is something about the blues that gives it a timeless, universal appeal – so why shouldn’t a group of boys growing up in Watford in the early 60s want to play this music? The fact that a boy from Oxford like Aaron Keylock is following the same path in 2012 is further proof that the blues will never die. The torch just gets passed on from one generation to the next.

The illiterate guide

Having finally bought myself an iPhone, I popped into WH Smith yesterday and picked up one of several guides to the device that were on sale there. I now wish I’d spent a bit longer making my choice, because The Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to iPhone (even the title is slightly off-kilter) is without doubt the most poorly-written commercial publication I have ever seen.

Even just skimming the first few pages on the train home, I spotted several typos: ‘sinked’ for ‘synced’, ‘piece of mind’, ‘fore more see page 37’... Further tell-tale signs of illiteracy soon revealed themselves; ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ used interchangably, commas and hyphens either used wrongly, or omitted when they were needed, and of course the grievous overuse of exclamation marks.

Above all, the English is just appalling. Take this sentence: “Amazing seems to little of word to describe it’s performance!” What’s amazing is how many errors the writer has managed to cram into 10 words - errors a GCSE student would be ashamed of. The whole guide reads as if it’s been hurriedly translated from a foreign language, or written by a non-native speaker, and I suspect one of these is the real explanation. Either that, or James Gale (named and shamed as Editor on the contents page) and his colleagues at Black Dog Media are just rubbish at English - which makes publishing a spectacularly poor career choice for them.

I’ve spent much of my career as a sub-editor, so I take bad writing personally (not to mention the fact that I spent £8.99 on this piece of illiterate garbage). But there’s more to it than that. The real issue here is that this is supposed to be a technical guide; if the authors can’t spell simple English words correctly, why should I trust them when they’re giving me instructions on how to set up my iPhone, or listing technical specifications or statistics? It’s bad enough wherever it crops up, but in non-fiction in particular, poor spelling and writing undermines the entire enterprise.

Don’t give up the day job

It seems that you can’t open the Guardian (or rather, the Books section of the Guardian website) these days without reading another depressing article about the future (or lack of one) for books and, as a result, authors.

A couple of weeks ago, Sam Leith wrote about how the Kindle was killing off the printed book and examined some of the implications. A week later, Ewan Morrison asked Are books dead, and can authors survive? The answers are, respectively, “not yet, but they will be soon”, and “no”. I don’t think that counts as a spoiler.

As I wrote a few months ago, this is a depressing time for someone like me who always dreamed of being a professional writer. When I was growing up, there appeared to be something approaching a career path for novelists. You write some short stories, some of which get published in magazines; you start to get a reputation, which means that when you send the manuscript of your first novel to agents, they’ve heard of you and take the trouble to read it; an agent takes you under their wing and gets you a modest advance for that debut novel; and, over the years, the advances increase in tandem with your sales.

Of course, I’m sure it was never quite that easy. I also suspect that my education didn’t help; my school, and then my university, were places where it was pretty much taken for granted that you would achieve great things in whatever field you decided to apply your talents to. Indeed, I shared a German translation class with a girl called Joanne Harris, who has had an immensely successful career as a writer, with 11 novels published to date. 

She’s one of the lucky ones; the last generation of novelists who will have the support network of a major publishing house behind them. For the rest of us, self-publishing, possibly combined with one of the new-tech ideas discussed by Sam Leith, looks like the best bet. But the prospects of finding a mass audience, let alone making enough money to write full-time, are bleak.

Full circle

The first poems I wrote, back when I was 17 or 18, were really song lyrics, or as good as, with regular rhythms and simple rhyme schemes. That’s not surprising, really, as I’d been listening to pop and rock music for years, whereas the only poetry I’d read up to that point was centuries-old (notably the work of the metaphysical poets, which I studied for A level) that was never going to be an influence on my writing.

Gradually, as I read more 20th-century poetry, my own poems became correspondingly more modern, sometimes even verging on the oblique. Not that I was afraid to rhyme when the poem called for it, unlike some of the poets at the workshop I attended weekly for the best part of 10 years, who regarded a rhyme in the same way as a vampire regards a stake.

Towards the end of that time, I finally settled on a voice, and a style, that I was happy with. I started telling stories in my poems, assuming the voices of characters rather than expressing my own personal concerns, and it felt right. It also helped to confirm my feeling that I was ready to start writing ‘proper’ stories, in the form of novels, and I left poetry behind when I did so.

Now that I’m working on song lyrics (as I explained in a recent post), it feels like I’m combining both extremes of my poetry years. I’m writing verses and choruses with strong rhythms and rhymes, but in those verses and choruses I’m telling stories about characters. That’s a challenge in itself, because it’s hard to tell a story in three verses, or three and a half minutes.

Thinking about it, maybe I should dig out my old notebooks and see if there’s anything I can use from my teenage poems… Then again, no. Best let sleeping dogs lie.

Overegging the pudding

Until recently, I’d only ever read two novels that were set in Watford – and I’d written one of them myself. (The other being Nick Corble’s excellent Golden Daze.) But I’ve just finished a third, and it’s a proper book by a well-known author: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by the ever-reliable Jonathan Coe.

Actually, only a small portion of the story actually takes place in Watford. But Max does live there, and this provides the excuse for a lengthy and excruciating monologue which is one of the highlights of the first chapter. (To find out exactly why it’s so excruciating, you’ll have to read the book: I don’t want to spoil the punchline.) A short extract will give you the flavour:

“… Caroline never really seemed to take to Watford, she never seemed entirely happy there, which I think is a shame, because, you know, there’s something good to be found everywhere, isn’t there?, which isn’t to say that, living in Watford, you wake up every morning and think to yourself, Well, life may be a bit shit, but look on the bright side, at least I’m in Watford, I mean it’s not as if Watford is the sort of place where the very fact that you’re living there gives you a reason to go on living, that would be overegging the pudding a bit, Watford just isn’t that sort of place, but it does have an excellent public library, for instance, and it does have The Harlequin, which is a big new shopping centre…”

And so on, for another page or so, with the name of the town cropping up remorselessly every couple of lines.

If I was the sort of person who got offended by such things, I might protest at the way Coe clearly suggests that his boring, bland and emotionally stunted protagonist has found a town that suits him perfectly. But really, what harm does it do? And at least he’s done his research, as another passage, where Max directs someone from Watford Fields to Watford Junction station, proves. I’ll even forgive him for calling it ‘Watford Field’. No one’s perfect.

A true journalist

Having written not long ago about my difficulties with non-fiction, it’s only fair to point out that I recently read a factual book all the way through, and was riveted throughout. Matt Potter’s Outlaws Inc. tells the story of the former Soviet airmen who make a perilous living flying cargo around the world in giant, but rickety, superplanes – everything from humanitarian aid to illegal drugs, often at the same time. It’s unlike any story I’ve ever read, and throws a whole new light on the way the world works.

I should say that I only knew about it at all because Matt is a friend. A few years ago we worked together at a publishing company, and I’d always assumed he was just another desk-bound hack like me. Little did I know that in his spare time he was hitching rides on these cargo planes, gathering material for this book – and risking death and disease in some of the world’s most dangerous cities, places like Kabul and Mogadishu.

Years ago, when I was studying journalism, one of my tutors made a useful distinction between writers and journalists. A journalist, she said, was someone for whom the story came first: they lived for the next lead, loved chasing down the details, and regarded writing it all up afterwards as a bit of a nuisance, frankly. Whereas a writer was someone who loved words above all, and it didn’t much matter what they were writing about as long as they could indulge in the art of composing sentences, paragraphs and pages that flowed in a pleasing manner.

I’ve always known that I’m a writer. In my professional life, I’ve never had the slightest desire to chase stories, let alone don a flak jacket and report from a war zone. Fiction is the natural home for whatever talents I possess. But Matt is a true journalist, and I salute him.

A bad week in December

I wrote a while ago about the benefits for a writer of reading bad books. I wouldn’t say A Week In December, the most recent novel by Sebastian Faulks, is a bad book exactly, but it has some serious flaws which got me thinking.

I should start by saying that I’m a fan of Faulks’ novels, all but one of which I’ve read and enjoyed. But they were all set in the past – various parts of the 20th century – whereas A Week In December is that most self-concious of literary forms, a State of the Nation Novel.

During the course of the week in question (the year isn’t specified, but the book was published in 2009), we follow the progress of a number of characters in London. Most notably, there is a ruthless, amoral hedge fund manager and a would-be Muslim suicide bomber, and the main question at the heart of the novel is which of them is going to cause the most damage. Then there’s a down-at-heel but sympathic barrister, a female tube train driver, a Polish Premiership footballer, the hedge fund manager’s pot-addled teenage son, a cynical literary critic, an ambitious politician’s wife, an Asian businessman who’s made a fortune from chutney...

The list goes on and on, to such an extent that Faulks has provided a sort of key to them all in the first chapter, under the pretext that most of them are being invited to a dinner party that takes place on the final day of the week in question. A friend suggested that the publishers must have insisted on this list being added to help the poor, confused reader, and I suspect he may be right. I certainly found myself referring back to it at regular intervals.

Using a large number of characters isn’t a literary crime in itself, of course, though in a novel of fewer than 400 pages, it’s not particularly reader-friendly. The contrivance of the dinner party is clumsy, too – pretty much the only major character who isn’t invited, children aside, is Jenni the tube driver, and you sense that Faulks would have sent here there as well if he could just have contrived to make her one of the other characters’ long-lost niece or some such. And don’t get me started on the caricatures, most notably the critic, R Tranter (Art Ranter – geddit?), whose entire characterisation smacks of revenge.

No, what I really wanted to write about was the hedge fund manager, John Veals. Clearly, any State of the Nation Novel written towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century is going to have to deal with the financial markets, and Veals is a folk devil, the personification of everything that led to the financial crisis whose effects we’re still feeling. The trouble is that, in order to explain why Veals is so evil, Faulks has to go into detail about what he does and how it works. Thus, approximately 80% of the long sections of the novel in which Veals features are devoted to meticulous explanations of how various aspects of international finance operate.

Many years ago, I read a book about how to write fiction. I don’t remember much of the advice it contained, but one phrase stuck in my mind: “Don’t let your research show.” Large parts of A Week In December feel like they consist of nothing but research, and for me at least, they spoiled the experience of reading the novel. It felt like homework: rather than engaging with the characters, I was spending my time trying (and failing, it has to be said) to understand the complex financial world they inhabited.

There is a counter-argument, of course: that this is important stuff, and that unless we all understand how a few clever, greedy, amoral people brought the global financial system to its knees, we can’t begin to have a chance of preventing them doing the same thing again in the future. Maybe the novel is a good medium for that kind of education. But on the basis of A Week In December, I don’t think so. I suspect many readers will simply tire of the economics lesson, put the book down and read something else entirely. And I wouldn’t blame them.

Buddy, can you spare a song?

I haven’t had a great deal of time to work on my latest novel recently, but I have been experimenting with a different kind of writing: song lyrics.

This came about because my friend Jason, a talented singer-songwriter, mentioned that he was thinking of writing some new songs on the guitar. (He also writes and records electronic music as part of the duo Blue Angel.) He said he’d always written his own lyrics before, and he thought it would be interesting to sing someone else’s. As a writer, would I be interested in coming up with something for him?

As it happens, I used to write a lot of poetry, and I was a regular attendee at poetry workshops and readings for most of my 20s. Then I decided I was ready to start writing fiction, which was where (I was pretty sure) my true talent lay, and gave up poetry as a distraction. I never wrote song lyrics per se, but that was mainly because I couldn’t put them to music myself and didn’t know anyone who’d be interested in doing so for me. As a music fan, I’ve always like the idea of being a lyric writer.

So now I’m getting back in touch with a much more concise form of writing than fiction, and one where rhythm is a central concern. I’ve also been consulting my old rhyming dictionary for the first time in many years. It’s challenging, like using a muscle you haven’t exercised for a long time, but a lot of fun too. Of course, it may not come to anything – but in my head, I’m already writing my acceptance speech for when I win an Ivor Novello award...