BREAKFAST WITH A NIHILIST

“It's never going to happen," he said.

She didn't look up. "You're so pathetic."

"Not pathetic," he said. "Realistic."

"God." She stirred her tea. "God, Simon. How can you expect other people to take you seriously if you're so negative all the time?"

He stood up. "What gets me is how you ignore all the evidence that being a nihilist is just plain common sense."

"Jesus, here we go." She sipped from the teacup even though the liquid steamed, then pursed her burned lips.

"Everything is futile, okay?” he said. “Everything is pointless. Fact."

He put his jacket on.

"What are you up to today?" she asked.

"Oh, this and that."

"This and what?"

"Just stuff. Just stuff, okay? Stop hassling me."

He hadn't always been like this, she thought. Once, he had been a doer, a thinker too, a maker of things. What she had first loved about him was his long skinny hands, the way he'd juggled a paint brush between them, his steady way of swishing on colour. The paint on the canvas all matted and rutted in swards of blue and crimson. Now, what was he? What had she married but a hollow man? She had forgotten what he looked like when he laughed.

There was a knock on the door.
         
"Yes?" he said, putting his hands in his pockets. "What is it?"

The door opened. A young man was standing there. He wore a dark suit and his hair was brushed flat from his forehead.

"Your car is waiting, Prime Minister," said the young man. "But I'm afraid the ambassador is running rather late."

MORNING PAGES

Just a quick check in today. After discussing the joys and addictive power of Facebook and email with a friend last night, I have decided I will always (major pledge here) write for at least 20 minutes each morning. Before switching the computer on. Yes, I know. Is that even possible?

Turns out, it is. This morning I got up, made a cup of tea, went to the corner shop, listened to something about a baby mammoth on the Today programme, then spent half an hour writing about the similarity and difference between sanity and madness.  (God knows why - I was planning to write a description of my kitchen.)  But what I do know is that I felt much, much saner at the end of it. I think morning pages (and swimming) may well be the meaning of life.

I don't get hung up about what I write, or whether it is imaginative enough, or whether anything makes sense, just keep going on. Wonderful feeling, no pressure, only words.

THE KID WITH THE BIKE

As you'll know if you have read my blog before, I am a firm believer in what Julia Cameron calls 'feeding the well'. In other words, writers need to absorb ideas and imaginative Stuff as well as think and write. Cameron says writing too much can empty the well; films, walks, nature, visual art, reading, musics, listening to people are needed to refill it. (Other inspirations are also available)

This weekend I read 'The Story of Lucy Gault' by William Trevor, a stunningly brilliant novel (Amazon review forthcoming) and saw 'The Kid with the Bike' (review below).

The film is directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and tells the story of Cyril (Thomas Doret), an 11-year old stuck in the care system; his mother is absent and his father is irresponsible. Wild, hard and intense, Cyril spends most of the film in motion, running, climbing, cycling. At first his frantic search for love gets him nowhere: his father is dismissive and wants nothing to do with him, more interested in prepping a restaurant kitchen than his desperate son. But everything changes when he runs into Samantha (Cecile de France), a hair-dresser and child-free earth mother.

The atmosphere of a grotty Belgian town permeates everything.  Doret is brilliant and reminds me of Billy (David Bradley) in  Ken Loach's 'Kes'.' But the massive hole at the centre of the story is the lack of either characterization or motivation in Samantha. Who - for reasons unknown - becomes his foster mother.

 Now, this film gets 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival and you may say all those earnest cineastes can't be wrong, and the Telegraph says this:

'A mainstream film would have distracted us with a spurious backstory about Samantha's own deprived childhood, or whatever – but that's not the Dardennes' way. Samantha and Cyril have connected, that's all: for the Dardennes, it's a given fact, the sort of brick they build their stories on.'

But I say, give me a story I can believe in, no matter how pared down you want to be. A single woman who suddenly decides to take in a semi-delinquent boy every weekend needs a back story of some kind, or a front story, or something. Establishing motivation isn't a sign of mediocrity. And it can be succinctly or symbolically done.

There's a touch of emperor's new clothes about critics refusing to criticise the Dardenne brothers for the fundamental implausibility of their narrative. Perhaps their aim was to emulate the likes of Tarkovsky or Bresson, but the films the old school auteurs made had a sense of folk-tale or universality about them that this film fails to communicate.

(Just did some online research and apparently the directors did intend it to be a 'fairy tale' so there you go. Samantha is supposed to be the fairy godmother. For me, though, simply stating that something is your intention doesn't mean that you succeed in achieving it.)

The Blues

Feeling blue? It's a beautiful day here, so the healthy have no excuses. Happiness should be our natural habitat, when the sun shines.

But it's never that simple, which is why a writer writes. Not feeling what you should feel, that's the starting point for wanting to find the words. That's  how it works for me, anyway. And I also feel as if the world we live in - the consumer, surface, smiling world - expects us to conform to an imposed idea of mental health.

Which is where 'the blues' comes in. Perky, positive, making it happen - no. Melancholy, moody, lost in your sad, bad feelings - yes. The blues can be a pause in the action, a resting place in gloom. The blues can be the time when you actually stop, and look around. The blues can be a chance to face yourself with something like honesty, and ask yourself the hardest questions.

If you are going to write anything worth writing - if I am - then we need the blues. We might not sing it, though I wish I could, but we can feel it. And write it. Happy people don't need to be writers, and the upbeat mood is great for the cover of a chick-lit book, but not for the inside of a writer's head.

With this in mind, I'll go off to the library with my overdue library book, wearing pink but feeling Goth, and brave the sun.

LEARNING TO BE PUBLISHED?

This post is inspired by a very interestng discussion on Facebook - you can find my page here.

One of the issues when teaching creative writing, or studying it, is the question of the outcome. What should a student expect from a BA or an MA in creative writing? Clearly, not all graduates of such programmes will land a book deal. Not every graduate wants to be a published writer, but most do. Those who don't find a publisher may feel they have failed in their ambitions.

The problem here is that more people than ever are writing and seeking publication, and so competition is fiercer than it was even five years ago. But it's not only a problem of access to publishing deals, but of the arbitary nature of such deals. It's considered bad form to mention this, but not all books in Waterstones are well-written. Genre fiction is often anodine and repetitious; literary fiction can be self-indulgent and over-written. Publishing is not scientific; it's emotional and personal. Publishers publish books they like, or 'feel passionate about'.

In this context, I strongly believe that all creative writing students should be encouraged to aim high, and seek publication for their work if that's their goal. Conventional publishing, with an agent and a publisher behind you, is still the best way to find readers and establish a reputation. No student should be discouraged from this. Publishing remains the gold standard in professional terms.

But on the other hand, I also believe that because of the publishing industry is cautious and conservative, it's also a mistake to write too narrowly with a specific market in mind. If you are going to spend thousands of pounds on a degree in the creative arts, then it should help you to be more creative. Being creative means thinking wild and crazy thoughts, coming at things laterally, being bold and weird. I'd like to see more of that on creative writing programmes, more experimentation.

Also, in the arbitary world of Chosen and Unchosen writers, best sellers have a habit of coming out of left field. (And best sellers are what everyone wants these days.) No one expected Fever Pitch or Bridget Jones' Diary to be game-changing books, but they were. The 'another one like that, please' mentality that prevails in publishing at the moment can stifle originality.

So creative writing programmes can do something really important : help foster bold new writing in any genre. Or even a genre that a student has created for themselves.  This is how we can help the Nick Hornbys and Helen Fieldings of the future, as well as the Ian McEwans. The support and feedback of peers and staff, the sense that hard work, redrafting and attention to detail are an intrinsic part of the writing process, the feeling that one is part of a community of like minded people - all of this is vital. These programmes can and should set standards that are not just as high as those expected in publishing, but higher. All students will benefit from that, and the skills and confidence they gain will be useful to them in any future career.

Not every graduate can be a published writer, but the graduates that do get published might help extend the possibilities of what being published means.

JUST ANOTHER SATURDAY

Saturday. Typically, what this writer's Saturday looks like is a bit of a mess. I usually get up early, have  a cup of Earl Grey tea, listen to a bit of hurly-burly on the Today programme, and do some work. This might be writing my thesis, which expands and goes sideways quite a lot, rather like a tent at the end of a camping holiday which doesn't want to go back in the bag. Or it might be some lesson prep for my lecturing. Sometimes, I write notes for new fiction ideas, or read around my big new novel concept, which I am secretly quite excited about.

Then the Actual Day starts - today it included going to a 'pre-loved fashion' sale with a friend, late breakfast in a cafe, a quick phone-row with teenage daughter who thought she should be in the cafe with us, exchanging Sim card in a new iphone, a trip to a flea market and then home again for more PhD work.

Then some Facebook and online stuff.  I try and look at this as an information gathering exercise, not a social thing, as it's very easy to spend hours and hours 'liking' and 'commenting' and then hoping to be 'liked' back. I think I am a tad too sensitive for social media; it reminds me of schooldays: trying to get in with the popular girls by saying really hilarious things, or measuring my social success by the number of people who clustered round my desk. (As soon as I came up with this measurement, all clustering stopped.)

I say all this not because I think all this is interesting, but because it fairly definitively isn't. One of the things that writers should do, in my opinion, is have the courage to be a tiny bit dull. Having wild adventures is useful (though not always possible in middle life) but so is The Everyday. You can't write all the time, you can't even think all the time, and sometimes the dailyness of things is a great life-saver, and sanity preserver.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER IN BILL'S CAFE

Here is another of my short, short pieces. I wrote this to be read out at the Brighton Moment, a collection of readings by local authors which took place at the Sussex Arts Club (now sadly no longer with us) in 2007. My career had stalled at the time, and this was a great breakthrough for me. I met several Brighton writers as a result, some of whom are still good friends.

I also discovered that a. I could write short, short pieces for reading aloud, b. I liked reading them and c. people laughed. Conclusion/useful advice nugget: it's worth experimenting with this kind of thing, and reading your work to anyone who will listen.

So here we go....

BRIEF ENCOUNTER IN BILL’S CAFE

There’s never any space here.  The wooden benches are crowded with toddlers and relentless uber-mums, scary Brighton dads with professional papooses and glossy students, charming each other over shared strudel.  Behind them, banks of cinematic fruit, waxy lemons, Technicolor strawberries.  Daily menus, indulgently wholesome, chalked up on little black boards. Charred veg with everything.   

Why did I bring the baby here? Just bloody minded, that’s my problem. Jackson is already screwing his face up into a Les Dawson gurn, ready to start screeching for a feed.  Should have gone to Starbucks.  I mean, look at them in their Camper boots and retro-horn rims. Barging into each other, then apologising with attitude. What is it with these women?  Some kind of Boudicca complex?  They act like those three wheeled buggies come with blades attached.

And why do they think breast feeding is an extreme sport? A little modesty wouldn’t go amiss. I tried a bit of stylish suckling myself, once, at a country wedding. Accidentally ended up topless in the family photos. Wrong kind of dress.   Bruised by this experience, I seek out dark corners so I can shove Jackson up my jumper for a furtive slurp.  Even then I’m a magnet for the criminally insane.

Finally, a seat.  One empty chair, opposite a member of the Maternal Majority, breast feeding, naturally, bare naked whammer the size of a football.  Cup of herbal in front of her. She’s wearing a cloche hat enlivened with knitted fruit.

“Is any one sitting here?”

She shakes her head. “Help yourself.”

I collapse in front of her and attach Jackson to my right breast. Her baby is glugging like a lager lout.  We exchange a look, not conspiratorial, exactly. But not hostile.

“How old is yours?” she asks after a while.

“Ten weeks.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Jackson.”

She says nothing, as if letting this sink in. Jackson.  My mother wanted me to call him Sebastian.  Boyfriend was all for Wolf. But as he’d left me, his views weren’t very influential.

“Mine’s a girl,” she says.

“Oh.”

“Nearly five months.”

“Lovely.”

“Rafaella.”

“Right.”

We drink our tea in silence.  Divided by a common experience.  Before I had a baby, I dreaded turning into a mum.  And now it turns out I was right. They’re the worst people I’ve ever met. After a bit, she unlatches the baby and winds it on her shoulder, on one of those NCT muslin shawls that you have to keep in a Cath Kidston changing bag.  Then she looks at me.  She has violet eyes, clear and shining with a stab of laughter behind them.

          “Never thought I’d see the day, did you?”

          “Which day?”

          “You know. This…”  Her laugh is like a question mark. “All this babv bollocks.  I was a proper person once.”

          She has three spots on her pointed chin, dark rings under her starry eyes. She’s beautiful.

          Slurp of tea.  I watch her over the rim of my cup.  She takes her stupid hat off, she has cropped yellow hair. Then, I blink madly. The café is wavering with tears. Something’s flown into my eye.

          She leans forward.  “Stay still.”

          “It’s okay, it’s nothing…”  I rub my hot eye, my wet cheek.

          Placing Rafaella across her knee, she takes the muslin from her shoulder. “Don’t move.  Don’t…”  She wipes my eye, swift and expert. “”There!  Got it! Tiny fly or something.”

          “Thank you.”  I shake my head, trying to return the world to its familiar shapes. I don’t want to catch her eye again. I put my glasses on.  They’re not modish. They make me look like Ann Widdecombe.

          Now she’s grinning, filling up all the space in my head.

          “Your baby’s called ‘Jackson’, but who are you?”

          “Alex.”

          “I’m Laura.” She touches my hand.  “We should do this again.” 

I look down at her freckled fingers, waiting for my next breath to come.

“Old married women, meeting up for tea,” she says, stroking her sleeping baby.  “That’s what passes for excitement now.”

          Jackson has fallen off my breast. A trail of milk drools over the side of his face, and his little alien hands jerk upwards, as if to save himself from falling.

(Painting: Two women in a cafe by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, May 6, 1880 - Jun 15, 1938)

VIRTUAL HERMIT

Have decided to go off-grid, or at least off-Facebook, for the period of Lent. Not because I am particularly religious, though too much exposure to Richard Dawkins can make me feel curiously pious for an atheist, but because I am fed up with having part of my cerebral cortex (or something) leeching into the keyboard of an evening.

I need all of the bits of my brain for writing, and all of my energy for fighting the good fight to transform what I am writing into Actual Books, via the medium of people in publishing. I have no brain power or energy resources available to process other people's restaurant choices, or be told what Guardian features they are reading, or check out their holiday snaps. One of the unsung skills of writing is working out what is cultural inspiration, and what is white noise.

The blogging, however, will continue, never fear.

FUN WITH NOVELISTS

Tiny bit of a joke in the title because there are people (my kids, my mother, most people I used to know before I caught the writing bug) who think that novelists are no fun at all.

Cue classic clip from 'Sideways' (Apologies for the redaction of 'fuck' by someone squeamish in YouTubeland.)

The line 'Don't go to the dark side' is now a family joke, as this is where I like to spend most of my time, in a V.Woolf sort of way. And I am just as keen on red wine as Miles/Paul Giamatti, though significantly less discriminating. (Ever wondered what kind of internet user Ms Woolf would have been? Or perhaps this is another example of my being a tiny bit weird.)

Of course, Miles is Unpublished, and the general assumption is that failure has a detrimental effect on the human personality, and success a beneficial one. I am Published, and looking at my character overall, I would say that on balance I am more of a pain in the arse now than I was before I got that corrupting glimpse of life on the other side of the portals of Penguin's HQ in the Strand.

Lilith Smiles in the Garden of Eden

So Lilith said to the Serpent: “Get thee behind me, Satan, I want a proper look at Number Two.”  And the Serpent moved pretty quickly.

            “Hi,” said Lilith.  “I’m Lilith.”

            “Hi,” said Eve.  She was combing her long hair. It was pale and wavy, prone to frizz in the rain. But she was proud of it.

            “Nice breasts,” said Lilith.

            “Thanks.” Eve had the disposition of a cat sprawled in a square of sunlight.

            Lilith didn’t say anything for a minute.  She was contemplating this naked girl, the mother of the human race, and her ever-so-slightly smug expression.

            “Shame about the belly,” said Lilith.

            “The – what?”

            “Belly.”

            Eve looked down.  She had a rounded, peachy stomach.  Adam loved it, and used to wake her every morning by softly kissing her navel, though why she had one God only knows.

            “I don’t understand,” said Eve.

            “Ever thought of working out?” said Lilith.  “You can do crunches for that.  Or the one where you lie on your back and lower your legs really slowly.  It’s agony but it does the business.” Lilith smiled.

            Eve smiled back. Her pale blue eyes widened.  She lifted a finger, sensing a shift in the quality of the air.  It had chilled a fraction, for Lilith had just made the first bitchy comment in the history of the planet.  Just the tiniest in-breath of its peaceable languor had gone for good.

            “Now, now,” said the Serpent, over its neat coils. “There’s no need for that.”

            “Need?” Lilith’s smile spasmed away. “Need?  What did Adam need? We were perfectly happy as we were.”

            “But we are perfectly happy as we are,” said Eve.

            “Is that so?”

            Lilith saw the apple before the Serpent did. She reached up and plucked it from the tree.  It was all russets and earth reds, a cool natural sphere.  She stroked it. 

            “This is where I come in,” said the Serpent.

            “Only in the versions men wrote down,” said Lilith. “While the women were dying in childbirth and cleaning behind the fridge.”

            She offered it to Eve.  “Why don’t you see if Adam is hungry?”

            And so God created the Ex Wife, and he saw that she was bad.

(Picture courtesy of Georgia O'Reilly, 2004)

10 top tips for getting published

·       Write the best possible book – and keep writing.

·       Buy the Writers’ and Artists’ Year book – every year.

·       Be proactive and network both online and with real human beings.

·       Keep up-to-date with new developments in agencies and publishing houses. Get free emails from The Bookseller

·       Set up your own blog, Facebook page and Twitter account. Connect with other blogs, comment and share useful information.

·       Go to conferences and festivals and find out what is going on, particularly in the small presses and new agencies. Example: Winchester Writers' Conference.

·       Enter short story completions, first novel awards etc. Submit work to the literary press, both online and in paper format.

·       Agents are useful in a crowded market, and invaluable when it comes to deal making. So try and get one, both by getting known and approaching agencies direct.

·       If you can’t, make the small press your next target. Again, keep up to date with new appointments, new lists etc. Example: Myriad Editions in Brighton.

·       Consider self-publishing – but don’t make this your life’s work. Useful websites:  Lulu.com and Grosvenor House Publishing

UNLEASH THE POWER OF YOUR NEGATIVITY

One of the great joys of writing is that fiction thrives on misery. As someone said to me recently: "Everybody wants to be happy, but no one wants to read a happy story." Happy endings are fine; happy beginnings are perfectly acceptable, but I have yet to read a gripping story which has a happy middle. And it's a short step from unhappy stories to unhappy authors. Writers as diverse as Dickens, Hemingway, Woolf and Orwell mined their own misery for stories and ideas. The naturally sunny and well adjusted person is - generally speaking - less inclined to write obsessively, committing the seat of the pants to the chair for the necessary hours, weeks, months and years.

We live in a society which undervalues gloom. There is a noble tradition of writing which draws on melancholy for its inspiration - more or less the entire Romantic movement, for a start. The art of staring out of the window thinking bleak thoughts and then writing some of them down is still with us. And thank God for this in society which seems to see happiness as an entitlement.

I'm writing this during Mental Health Awareness Week. I don't want to trivialise the real suffering and debility that serious mental ill health causes, but I do believe that in setting impossible ideals for our emotional well-being, many  of us are putting ourselves  under undue pressure to be 'normal' and 'happy'. To me, this is the psychological equivalent of looking at anorexic adolescents in magazines and hating your own flesh. A certain degree of mental unease and anxiety is positively useful for writers. (Although too much can stop us writing altogether as Virginia Woolf knew only too well - you can sense her scribbling to keep insanity at bay in the almost manic wisdom of her notebooks.)

Even so, fiction would be much the poorer without the functioning neurotic. And speaking from experience, I know that writing fiction can help us find a sort of equilibrium even if it is only partial and temporary.

10 reasons to love Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is, as if you didn't know, 200 years old today. So - Happy Birthday, Mr Dickens.  I have dragged myself from my convalescent sick bed (wisdom tooth extraction + general anaesthetic = miasmic weirdness) in order to write something about what I like about this man.  In fact, 10 things:

1. He did not calm down, get over himself, stop banging on, or "chill".
2. His characters burst out of his stories like rabbits out of a sack.
3. His plots were insane and no one cares.
4. He was the king of day jobs: reporter, actor, writer, editor, philanthropist and pater familias.
5. He looked like a cross between Rasputin and Father Christmas.

6. People still love his books: In  The Big Read carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100. A Tale of Two Cities has sold more than 200 million copies since it was published in 1859.
7. He sent proper written invitations to "fallen women" to come to his college to be educated.
8. He put the City of London on acid.
9. He didn't want to be buried in Poet's Corner but asked to be buried  in Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner".

10. This description:

"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds."
Bleak House, Chapter One, In Chancery

Whatever it is, this thing we writer people are trying to do when we are sitting there, trying to do it, this is the thing.