Andrew Blackman

This is a wonderfully lucid book. I would not hesitate to take writing advice from Dorothea Brande, for the simple reason that her own writing is so elegant and clear. As I was reading, I was reminded of George Orwell’s dictum that good writing should be like a window pane. Brande’s book, written in 1934, is a perfect exemplar. It does not draw attention to itself, but simply communicates the author’s ideas in a clear, pleasing manner.

Brande states from the outset that she will not deal with issues of technique. Even in 1934, there were plenty of books and writing courses to give advice on plot, pacing, etc. In any case, her belief is that in most aspiring writers, the problems holding them back are not technical, but psychological. The reason people turn up to workshops and classes and buy endless books is not to learn the craft, but to discover the secret of being a great writer.

In almost every case he will be disappointed. In the opening lecture, within the first few pages of his book, within a sentence or two of his authors’ symposium, he will be told rather shortly that genius cannot be taught; and there goes his hope glimmering.

The aspiring writer may not believe that he/she is looking to acquire the secret of a writer’s genius, but that’s really what it is, even if only unconsciously held – an idea that there is some kind of magic about writing. And Brande agrees: “I think there is such a magic, and that it is teachable. This book is all about the writer’s magic.”

The rest of the book contains a lot of practical advice on setting schedules, etc., all of which is good. But the part that really stood out for me was her discussion of genius. For her it is not a rare gift owned only by the likes of Shakespeare; rather it’s something that anyone can access, but most people don’t know how to. She says that writers should think of themselves as split personalities: a hard-working, sensible artisan, and a free-spirited, spontaneous, sensitive artist. Both sides must be in balance: too much spontaneity and the writing never gets done; too much sense and the writing gets done but is no good.

Having recognised this need for a split personality, it is then important to cultivate the sensitive “unconscious” side even as your workaday self gets you to your desk on time. One idea I loved was not talking about your writing until it is done. This is something I have always done without really knowing why – it just seemed to work better for me that way. Brande’s view is telling a story to friends before writing it down is very dangerous:

Your unconscious self (which is your wishful part) will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large… Afterward you will find yourself disinclined to go with the laborious process of writing that story at full length; unconsciously you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

In addition, the unconscious is very sensitive to criticism, and the damage done by talking too freely can be severe:

Send your practical self out into the world to receive suggestions, criticisms or rejections; by all means see to it that it is your prosaic self which reads rejection slips! Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling which go to make up a story.

There’s so much other valuable advice in this book that I can’t summarise all of it. In fact, I feel as if I should read this book on a regular basis. So many of the ideas resonated with me, but they’re the sort of thing that are easy to forget when you’re mired in the routine of writing. So this is definitely one to keep on the shelf, and pull out at regular intervals, especially when things are getting tough and inspiration is hard to find.

Andrew Blackman Dorothea Brande becoming a writer, book review, Dorothea Brande, Writing

I read this book a couple of years ago now, before I had this blog. As I was clearing out stuff this weekend I came across my handwritten notes, stuffed into the bottom of a box where I would never have read them again. This is why I started blogging. I’m typing the notes up so that I have a record of the book that I can access easily, and so that I have one less piece of paper cluttering up my flat. It’s not going to be a well-shaped review – these are just notes on what I found interesting or useful as I was reading through.

Forster proposes that chronology is irrelevant in literature; he prefers to think of novelists from all periods sitting in a room with pen in hand all writing simultaneously. I suppose the idea of that is to get away from focusing on the trends and styles of particular periods and look instead at the underlying commonalities, the vital “aspects of the novel” that are shared by almost all novels in different places and times.

First is what he calls the “primitive” aspect of the story moving forward in time: “and then this happened, and then that happened.” I seem to remember he used the example of cavemen telling stories around the fire. A good novel has to have more than this, but all novels have a good basic story at the centre, something to get the reader’s attention and keep them following along.

The second aspect is people, but people in novels are not like those in real life. We can see their inner life if the novelist chooses to show us, and so we can know them better than we know anyone in real life. Even people we are intimate with we know only by external signs – what they say or do, the expressions on their face. In a novel we can go inside their head, know everything about them and their life history. It gives us a certainty or perfection that we never have in real life. Forster says it gives us solace, making humans seem more understandable. Fictional characters also tend to be more sensitive than people in real life, and more attention is given to things like love than to the other basic facts of life – birth, food, sleep and death.

Fictional characters can be flat or round. Flat characters are ‘types’ or caricatures, people who can be summed up in a phrase. They have one function in the book and consistently perform that function exactly as expected. This can sometimes be effective – they are recognisable and consistent; most of Dickens’s characters are flat and yet he is one of the best novelists. In general, though, flat characters are best for a limited or comic role – tragic figures must be round.

The test of a flat character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.

Forster doesn’t like writers who betray too much interest in their own method, or “draws readers into his confidence” by showing them how the novel works. This was in 1927, long before the flourishing of postmodern metafictional writing – Forster would probably hate a lot of today’s most admired literary novelists.

The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and has summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results.

The next aspect of the novel is the plot. This is a higher form than the story, because it deals with causality:

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The queen died and no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king” is a plot.

The reader in this case must have not mere animal curiosity about “what happened next” but memory and intelligence, to be able to fit together facts from different parts of the novel and see how they all connect by the end. Plot and character can often be at war, particularly towards the end of a novel, when the writer is trying to pull the plot together into a suitable denouement, and sometimes characters who would have developed in another direction have to be corralled into serving the purpose of the plot. In a good plot, everything happens for a reason. It can have mysteries, but not mislead.

The plot maker expects us to remember; we expect him to leave no loose ends.

Sometimes characters have to be subservient to the plot, for example we don’t see a character developing for a while, until suddenly they do something unexpected and we realise they’ve changed while we weren’t looking. It’s less faithful to character, but better for the plot to have a surprise element rather than revealing things gradually.

Andrew Blackman EM Forster aspects of the novel, e.m. forster, Literary news, novels, Writing

It was one of those moments when you realise you’re old – or at least no longer young. I am working on editing the draft of my next novel, and decided to go to a cafe – somewhere I hadn’t been before, a fresh location for a fresh perspective on the manuscript.

All was going well as I got an enormous fry-up and mug of tea for £4. But then as I settled down to work, the music in the place just started driving me crazy. They had the radio on, and it was all the latest pop music, and it just drove me crazy. It was impossible to form good sentences while listening to Rihanna singing “Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?” or 50 Cent saying “Have a baby by me, be a millionaire”.

So I took out my iPod, put on Andrea Bocelli and felt like an old man sitting in a cafe listening to Andrea Bocelli. The worst of it was that in the quiet moments, some of the jangly pop music came through, and so I had to turn up the iPod louder and louder, and in no time I got the dreaded “Low battery” message which, in the case of my iPod, means basically no battery at all – a couple of minutes later it switched itself off, and I was left with the radio.

Here’s the thing, though – I stayed, and in the end it wasn’t so bad. Most of the stuff didn’t really grab me, but it wasn’t unpleasant either. I managed to turn it into just background noise, and focus on my work, and in the end I got quite a lot done. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways and impatient when it comes to hearing new stuff. Pop music was never high art, but I could always listen to it before.

Is it just me, though, or is some of the latest stuff a new level of nastiness? According to MetroLyrics, the parts I couldn’t hear were even nastier than the parts I could. For example, in 50 Cent: “I bet I’ll get you open, I’ll leave your headboard broken”. Or in Rihanna, “Tonight I’mma let you be a rider, Giddy up, baby, giddy up, giddy up babe.”

Let me clarify: it’s not that they’re singing about sex, I have no problem with that. It’s the violent imagery, the emotionless, loveless, animalistic nature of it, that just makes me sad. Broken headboards and horse-riders and breaking you off and getting you open and pull my hair and touch me there and give it to me baby like boom boom boom. God I feel old right now.

Andrew Blackman London life aging, cafe, music, Writing

I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a book a week. I think I do this already, but have never really tracked it for a full year to find out if it’s true. So this year I want to make a note of every book I read, and also review it on this site, and I’m aiming for 52 books for the year. I’ve added a new page on the top menu, 2010 reading, where I will post updates.

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized 2010, goals, Reading, Writing

All is well, despite the silence. I’ve been putting all my energy into winning a short story contest. With a £25,000 prize and a star-studded judging panel, I’m expecting the competition to be fierce. To win, I think I’ll have to write something better than anything I’ve written before.

The deadline is next Monday at 5pm, and at this rate I’ll be taking a taxi across London and hand-delivering it at 4:59. But I will finish, and I will enter the contest. Winning or not winning is out of my hands, of course, but I have promised myself that I will at least enter, and I will take the time to produce a story I am truly proud of.

I’ve also been trying to make a lot of progress on my next novel before taking a long Christmas break. So in other words, I am in a ‘manic phase’. Blog posts (and also email, for those of you who’ve emailed me) have had to be sacrificed for now, along with many other things. It’s not a very sensible way to live, but it’s only for a while. I’ll write more when I next come up for air.

Andrew Blackman Being a writer mania, short story contest, Writing

These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul.

In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can ‘speak for’ his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new country. I was interested in his initial desire as a young writer to write “on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese”. He makes it clear that he later abandoned this position, but I would have liked to know more about how and why.

In fact, throughout the whole book I would have liked to know more about Ha Jin’s thoughts on migration. His journey, after all, was an interesting one – from an uneducated teenage soldier in the Chinese army during the Cultural Revolution to a professor at Boston University and author of five novels, a couple of which I’ve read and greatly enjoyed. I would have liked him to draw on his own experience of migration, but he does so only rarely, in small glimpses like the one mentioned above. Mostly what we have is a survey of other writers and their thoughts on migration – quite interesting, but for me ultimately unsatisfying because there was no clear overall argument or point of view to draw the whole thing together.

In any case, it was interesting to learn about Solzhenitsyn’s life in America, how he lived in rural Vermont but never really settled, never took citizenship, was always waiting to go back to Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union he got his chance, but the interesting thing was that after moving back home, he struggled to speak effectively on behalf of the new Russia, as he had spoken on behalf of the old while in exile. His later books Russia in Collapse (1998) and Two Hundred Years Together (2001) were coldly received, and he was seen as out of touch. Even his radio show was cancelled due to low ratings. Ha Jin’s point is that he was loved for his earlier masterpieces, but even that did not give him the right to speak on behalf of the people – when his views no longer matched theirs, they rejected him.

The second essay, The Language of Betrayal, deals with the decision to write in another language. Again, Jin does not speak of his own decision to write in English and whether he feels this is a betrayal — instead we hear about Joseph Conrad being criticised for abandoning the Polish language, and Nabokov’s difficulty writing poetry in English even though he was a master of prose.

An Individual’s Homeland explores the difficulty of returning home — the way that Odysseus initially didn’t recognise Ithaka when he returned after his twenty years of exile, because both he and the land itself had changed. As Jin says, “One cannot return to the same land as the same person.” He talks of using art to survive, as the character Max Ferber does in W.G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants. He ends by referring to the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who positions ‘Ithaka’ as a destination for life’s journey, but not necessarily a return to the homeland. The homeland becomes a part of the past that can be used “to facilitate our journeys”.

As you’d expect from an English professor, the analysis of writers and books here is astute and interesting. I just got the feeling sometimes that he was talking about other writers to avoid talking about himself. Using literary examples is a good idea, but I’d have preferred them to be used to support a clearer argument from Ha Jin himself, drawing on his own experiences to give us his unique, original perspective instead of a summary of other people’s.

Andrew Blackman Ha Jin book review, ha jin, migration, Writing

I had a wonderful trip to New York. The book-related reasons to go were to sign copies at the Columbia Alumni Book Fair and to give a speech at the Jack Kerouac Literary Group, both of which went very well.

Outside of the scheduled events, it was great to spend some time in New York City, where I lived for six years before moving back to the UK in 2006. I managed to catch up with friends from my various incarnations:  a corporate banker at Citigroup, a student at Columbia and then a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. And then I spent time just wandering down memory lane. Of course things have changed, but most of the old favourites are still there. As I list them, it’s interesting how many of them are food-related! Anyway, in my old neighbourhood on the Upper East Side: hot pastrami on a poppyseed bagel from Tal Bagel (I used to live in a little apartment upstairs), breakfast at the old-fashioned Mansion Diner, and little choux pastries filled with custard from the Choux Factory. Further downtown, brunch at Danal’s was a must. Then there was Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the various riverside walks in Manhattan, and of course a lazy, sunny afternoon lying on the Great Lawn in Central Park reading a book and trying not to get hit by frisbees. And visiting friends in New Jersey gave me an excuse to rent a Corvette for a day and hit the gargantuan American highways.

I realise that holiday snapshots are usually more interesting for the person who went on the holiday than for everyone else, but I’m posting a few of them anyway

Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx. Just around the corner there was a cricket match going on - not quite what I expected to find in the Bronx, but I spent a very relaxing afternoon watching it.

Columbia University. The bouncy castle wasn't there in my day - standards must be dropping...

Lower Manhattan as seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. 111 Wall Street, where I used to work, is the squat dark building just left of centre. It looks small here, but at 24 storeys it would be one of the tallest buildings in London.

The Great Lawn in Central Park. It didn't stay this empty for long.

Sometimes you just have to get out of the city...

Andrew Blackman Literary events bronx, brooklyn, columbia journalism school, jack kerouac literary group, new york, travel, upper east side, Writing

I was experimenting with writing my next novel in the present tense. For a while it went well. The present tense felt more immediate, a little fresher, and was appropriate to the story I was trying to tell.

But gradually I began to feel constricted. The present tense seemed to work well for describing scenes as they were happening, but not for filling in the gaps between the scenes. My novel was becoming a slightly repetitive series of mini-stories with no clear link between them. I found it difficult to step back and give a broader sweep. The attempts to do so felt forced and clunky.

Another thing I noticed was that I was describing every little thing that happened in more detail than usual. When we’re talking about things in the past, we naturally skip over some things and spend more time on others. Time is stretched and distorted, and it feels natural because we are used to describing things that way. When I’m writing in the present tense, on the other hand, jumping ahead within a scene feels odd. Time in the present tense moves at a fairly steady, plodding pace, and unfortunately my present tense novel was moving at that same steady, plodding pace. I was describing every cup of tea, every step that every character took to and from the kitchen.

It was a very boring novel.

So I switched to past tense, and suddenly everything began to flow along nicely. I could easily jump around and tell the reader only what mattered. I could control the pace and tell the story in what felt to me to be a more natural way. I began to approach my writing each morning with eagerness rather than dread.

My experience with present-tense narrative, then, was quite short-lived. That’s not to say it’s a bad idea, of course, but I know that it didn’t work for this novel. I have used it successfully in short stories, and can see it being useful in small segments of a novel. But I won’t be trying to write a whole novel in present tense again any time soon.

And as I thought about it more, I couldn’t think of many good novels I’ve read that have used the present tense throughout. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey would be one, and the present tense definitely worked well there, but I’m stuck for any others. What about you? Have you read any good present-tense novels? Have you written one yourself? Let me know.

Andrew Blackman Being a writer narrative style, present tense, Writing

Came across some good back-to-basics writing advice over on How Publishing Really Works. The bottom line:

Just write every day, and read more often than you write, and your writing will improve.

I am a keen reader, but sometimes when faced with the competing pressures of finishing a manuscript, paying the rent and occasionally having a social life, reading can slip down my list of priorities. I thoroughly agree with Jane, though – it’s absolutely indispensible for a writer to read widely. It’s good advice to keep in mind.

Andrew Blackman Being a writer, Reading Reading, Writing

This is a rigorous 1950s analysis of prose, seeking to classify different elements of prose as you would classify insects or flowers. From the broad divisions of types of prose (narrative, argumentative, dramatic, informative, contemplative), Boulton proceeds to smaller divisions and sub-divisions, for example listing and defining 36 different rhetorical devices. Despite the intense detail, it was an easy read – the writing, as you’d expect from an anatomist of prose, was quite stylish and always very clear.

The part I found most interesting and useful was the chapter on prose rhythm. Boulton explains how to scan prose as you would poetry, breaking it down into ‘feet’ and then analysing where the stress falls within each foot. For example “become” is an iambic foot, because the stress falls on the second syllable, whereas “outcome” is a spondee, because both syllables are stressed. There’s a great listing of all possible combinations up to the five-syllable dochmiac, and then examples of passages scanned for rhythm. For example in a Bible passage (Psalm 90, v1-9), she shows how the rhythm builds up to climaxes such as the molossus (three syllables, all stressed) – “Thou art God”. Important parts like this are surrounded by weaker stresses to highlight them. When the passage speaks of man’s weakness, the rhythm is faltering, using weaker paeons (four syllables with only one syllable stressed). The rhythm, in other words, reflects and amplifies the content.

I don’t think I’ll spend much time analysing the rhythm of my prose, or anyone else’s, in that much detail, but it’s wonderful to have that knowledge in the back of my head, as a way of understanding why a particular passage may or may not work.

Another useful chapter was the one on the Science of Rhetoric, listing all the main rhetorical devices used in English and their meanings. This is a great reference to have. The ones she lists are: metaphor, simile, analogy, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, euphemism, prolepsis, transferred epithet, syllepsis, zeugma, inversion, hyperbole, litotes, pun, alliteration, assonance, onomatopeia, irony, antithesis, epigram, paradox, oxymoron, repetition, aposiopesis, rhetorical question, apostrophe, climax, anti-climax, innuendo, periphrasis, surprise ending, playful use of colloquialism, conscious use of cliché, quotation, literalism.

The explanations throughout are clear and well illustrated with examples, mostly from older literature like the Bible and 18th century writers, but also some more contemporary (for 1954) writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf. I’ve never seen writing analysed so scientifically before. I’ve noticed that a sentence can sound immeasurably better when the order is altered a little or a word is taken out, but never knew why. This book helped me to understand it much better, and I think it will make me a better writer and reader.

Andrew Blackman Marjorie Boulton grammar, prose, rhetoric, style, Writing