“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
Brenda Ueland
After much reading and re-reading and writing of lists, I awarded the London Fringe Short Fiction Award to Alex Burger for his story London: Through a Glass Darkly. The theme of the contest was ‘London: Glamour and Grime’, and I thought Alex’s story explored the theme in a very innovative way. The story is narrated by a self-proclaimed “remnant” of an earlier London, a London of brown water, dead rats and cats rotting in the street, a London of rotten meat painted with blood to make it look fresh. The story really brings out the connection between the superficially ‘glamorous’ modern London and our grimy, diseased past.
We’re not so different really. Hell, I watch you come in the mornings, streaming to work. Then I see you in pubs after work, falling drunk and high in the street. You die in your houses, have your own plagues, but it’s the same death, just hidden away. At least we faced ours straight on.
I gave Alex his prize today at the Old Operating Theatre, a fantastic venue, the oldest operating theatre in Europe, with a scratched old wooden operating table in the middle and steep banks of seating all around. The runners-up and commended writers also read their work, and there were some stories I really liked. “Perspective” by Annabel Banks, a story about how city people come together briefly in a moment of tragedy, won 2nd prize, and “The Grand Union”, a dark story about resisting the urge to push someone in a canal, came 3rd.
If you’re interested to see what I’ve been up to for the last couple of weeks, you can read all the shortlisted stories here. And if you’re a Londoner with an idea for an artistic, theatrical or literary event of any kind, check out the London Bridge Festival, of which this contest was a part. The main festival was now over, but the “Fringe” goes on all year, and they’re open to new ideas.
Just read a great article by Rita Carter in the Spring edition of The Author. It’s not available online, but it makes reference to, and explores many of the same issues as, this Atlantic article by Nicholas Carr. The basic issue, hinted at in the title: reading on the internet is different from reading a book. In fact, the way we think may be different. Less sustained, more scattered. Faster but more superficial. We skim, click around, get interrupted, start again, follow a tangent. We learn quickly, but in an unfocused way.
The article title is a little provocative – neither author really argues that Google is making us stupid. But they do raise real concerns about whether our brains are being “re-wired” by online reading. Unfortunately there’s not much scientific research to draw on yet, so the conclusions are mixed. In fact, Carter points out the positive side of online reading – the active, “search-and-find” rather than “sit-back-and-receive” state. So, she concludes, “perhaps the cerebral tinkering that alarms Nick Carr and others is actually a kind of neural upgrade which will allow old brains to function better in the future.”
I am definitely aware of a big difference in how I think, read and behave online as opposed to, say, a library. I’ve always been a quick reader, and at university when I had hundreds of books on a reading list for a term, I frequently skimmed them, for example just reading the first chapter and last, and the first and last paragraphs of each chapter in-between. But that was the exception. In general, I always read quickly but methodically, from beginning to end.
Online, it’s a different story. I go on to check a fact for my book, and an hour later I have eight tabs open in my browser, have replied to a load of emails and am chatting with someone on Facebook while skipping between an article on child slavery in Cote d-Ivoire and a blog post on Gordon Brown, while simultaneously checking the football scores. What did I go online for again? No idea, so I close down, go back to my writing, and find there was a fact I was supposed to look up a while ago.
I have now recognised that I am simply unable to write while the internet is on. But more worryingly, I am also unable to write AFTER I’ve been on the internet. Even if I switch off my wireless card and have nothing open but Microsoft Word, I find my mind is less focused. It’s as if, having been foraging all over the internet for a million pieces of information, doing ten or twenty things at once, my brain doesn’t want to be tied down to the slower, more prosaic, isolated, demanding but decidedly one-track task of writing a novel.
So I’ve made a rule. On writing days, the internet stays off until I’ve done my writing for the day. If I need to look something up, I write it down and look it up later. It’s the only way I can function.
Does anyone else feel that they read or think differently online? Can you read long, serious articles online, or do you have to print them out? Can you stop and think deeply about something online, or do you find yourself engaging in a kind of “staccato” thought process? Do you think our brains are being re-wired? If so, is it for better or for worse?
“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
Barbara Kingsolver
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I read this book before it was exposed as containing significant doses of fiction. I was blown away by the raw power of the story and the spare, hard-hitting writing. It’s hard for me to say how much of that was because I thought it was true. Certainly that added something. When you believe the narrator really did have a root canal without anaesthetic, really was wanted in however many states, etc., it makes the whole thing much more visceral.
The sad thing is that a lot of probably was true, but now we don’t know which bits (well, maybe it has all been dissected now and the truth separated from the lies, but I haven’t really been paying attention). As a story about dealing with addiction, it is still powerful. It’s a shame he felt he had to claim it as truth, even with fictional elements.
What I liked about the story, too, was that when I was reading it I kept waiting for the revelation of what caused his addictive, self-destructive behaviour and, in the end, there was nothing particularly shocking about it. That captured something about addiction: that it’s not some special thing that only people who’ve been through great trauma fall victim to. It happens to people for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes it just doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. Sometimes it’s just this internal fury, this thing that needs to be fed. I loved some of the writing, and parts of the book still stay with me now a few years later, whether they were true or false.
My debut novel On the Holloway Road (Legend Press, February 2009) won the Luke Bitmead Writers' Bursary and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.
It tells the story of two young Londoners who, inspired by Jack Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road, embark on a similar search for meaning and freedom in modern-day Britain. 
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